> was fairly counter-productive with all its talk about "UTF-8 strings" Eh. I agree and disagree. I agree in the sense that the phrase "UTF-8 string" is genera

> was fairly counter-productive with all its talk about "UTF-8 strings" Eh. I agree and disagree. I agree in the sense that the phrase "UTF-8 string" is generally a misnomer and is a good signal that there's some confusion somewhere, but I don't find think I find it as damning as you do. In particular, not all languages represent strings as sequences of codepoints, and instead make their internal UTF-8 byte representation a first class part of their string API. Two languages that come to mind are Go and Rust, where Go's conventionally uses UTF-8 and Rust uses enforced UTF-8. But in both cases, accessing the raw bytes is not only a standard operation, but is necessary whenever you want to do high performance string processing. That is, if someone said Go/Rust had "UTF-8 strings," that wouldn't be altogether wrong. UTF-8 is a first class aspect of both string APIs, while both provide standard functions you'd expect from Unicode strings.