Why? The concept of a "character" actually becomes a lot less meaningful as you add support for all of the world's writing systems (and even all of the features

Why? The concept of a "character" actually becomes a lot less meaningful as you add support for all of the world's writing systems (and even all of the features of even the Latin alphabet, such as diacritics and ligatures). Between combining characters, ligatures, case mapping rules that map one character to many, and so on, you realize that actually, there are very few cases where you want to address a "character" as a single independent entity. In fact, for almost everything you do, just acting on a string of bytes is more useful than trying to act on characters individually.