One of the root problems here is that a concept like "character" is extremely underdefined. What you want to do in terms of counting the memory a string will ta

One of the root problems here is that a concept like "character" is extremely underdefined. What you want to do in terms of counting the memory a string will take up, indicating a particular spot in the string, mapping to arrow keys or the backspace key in a visual program, knowing how far to indent to drop a caret in a visual error report, knowing the width of the string in a visual (especially fixed-width) text display. For ASCII text, you can use the same value to represent all possible slightly different definitions, but in non-ASCII, you need to use different definitions, and there's no one true definition that solves all use cases (no, not even grapheme clusters).