> You are looking at the issue from the perspective from a language user, not a language designer. 20 years ago we didn't have languages such as Python/Ruby which had internal multibyte support in their sting manipulation functions.

20 years ago was 1997. I'm reasonably certain NSString has been unicode-aware for much longer than that.

> 20 years ago string manipulation functions didn't even exist!

What kind of absolute utter nonsense is that?

> But this post is about the design of the language, not the application, and the language is still written in C/C++ and _internally_ stores strings as byte arrays that must be presented nicely to the programmer in that language's string manipulation functions.

So?