Sure, UTF-8 isn't always the shortest, but for many common strings (like JSON-encoded objects with ASCII keys) it is much shorter than UTF-32. The point is tha

Sure, UTF-8 isn't always the shortest, but for many common strings (like JSON-encoded objects with ASCII keys) it is much shorter than UTF-32. The point is that using a list representation means you can't do any better than UTF-32, even if you wanted to.