Right, that was one of the obviously-correct representations at the time. When the pioneering major Unicode-based systems (later Mac OSes, Windows NT, Java, etc

Right, that was one of the obviously-correct representations at the time. When the pioneering major Unicode-based systems (later Mac OSes, Windows NT, Java, etc.) were being built, the Unicode consortium thought code points were just 16 bits, so two-byte characters were a fine solution, trading off some memory but retaining "normal" string characteristics like O(1) indexing and easy size calculation. Pretty much everybody went with that, except Plan 9, which nobody was paying attention to as they invented UTF-8, which is now saving our bacon--thanks! Then after all those runtimes and APIs were established, the Unicode consortium realized 65,000 characters wasn't actually enough and blew up all those assumptions. Since then, things have been very uncomfortable in those systems, string-wise. Next-generation systems are incorporating the semantics of modern Unicode, but it'll take a long while to fix this--you can't just redefine a primitive type like "string" in an existing giant codebase.