@Sutherlands said:
Have you heard of UTF-8, UTF-16, or ISO 8859?
Clearly you've never worked with any of those encodings. They aren't fixed-width encodings. For in-memory manipulation of data I can hardly think of worse choices. If I say "write me a function that determines the length of a string," this is suddenly a monumental task. An operation like "give me the 17th character in the string" is a O(n) operation instead of O(1).