One step further, I was doing text processing and my very western education taught me that characters were the smallest relevant construct when dealing with tex

One step further, I was doing text processing and my very western education taught me that characters were the smallest relevant construct when dealing with text. Except that's simply not true for most eastern languages. Devanagari, Arabic, Bengla, Thai and so many other languages are packed with diacritics and graphemes, conditional rendering based on surrounding letters and much more that force you to completely rethink your approach.