If you're working with an image, you might have an Image class, that has a Image.width and a Image.height in pixels, regardless of how these pixels are laid out

If you're working with an image, you might have an Image class, that has a Image.width and a Image.height in pixels, regardless of how these pixels are laid out in memory (depends on encoding, colorspace, etc). Most if not all methods operate on these pixels, e.g. cropping, scaling, color filtering, etc. Then, there might be a Image.memory property that provides acces to the underlying, actual bytes. I don't understand why the same is not the obvious solution for strings. len("🇨🇦") should be 1, because we as humans read one emoji as one character, regardless of the memory layout behind. Most if not all methods operate on characters (reversing, concatenating, indexing). And then, if you need access to the low level data, the String.memory would contain the actual bytes... which would be different depending on the actual text encoding.