[masklinn]

> 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?

[dotancohen]

That should have been _30_ years ago string manipulation functions didn't exist.

NSString may have been Unicode-aware (I've never used Objective-C), and I believe that even the early Javas supported multibyte strings, but at that time most business and consumer desktop applications in the Windows world were still written in C/C++. Do you remember when the Euro symbol became common? I'm pretty sure that character alone was responsible for much of the push to support Unicode.