Right. I meant "C-style" in the sense of Lua being oriented around the kind of single/multibyte encodings used with ANSI C (as contrasted with kind of the UCS-2

Right. I meant "C-style" in the sense of Lua being oriented around the kind of single/multibyte encodings used with ANSI C (as contrasted with kind of the UCS-2 and UTF-16 stuff you get with Win32 and Java).