I AM AN EXPERT PROGRAMMER

I have 20 years programming experience writing HUGE Programs that you couldnt even comprehend. I wrote an ANSI C compiler when I was 12 years old.

You should just accept everything I say, I dont HAVE to give any reasons for my arguments because I am an EXPERT PROGRAMMER.

>>21
UTF-16 is the sane solution for string manipulation. Save for surrogates, which are seldom used and you can very well afford the effects if you want to use them, you have O(1) length (with a decent strings library) and O(1) indexing.