Asymtotic complexity can't change based on the character set, since you can just reuse the same algorithm with larger opaque datums. (Exception being algorithms

Asymtotic complexity can't change based on the character set, since you can just reuse the same algorithm with larger opaque datums. (Exception being algorithms with O(n^8) or O(n^256) complexity, but noone uses those anyway.) A variable width encoding can cause issues in principle, but useful algorithms already have to deal with strings that have variable-length physical represention anyway (eg "yes" vs "no"), so it tends not to be a problem in practice.