> A more interesting question is whether UCS-4's advantages are worth it. It provides an array of characters, but as the years pass, the code I see does ever less char-array processing on strings. 20-30 years ago the world was full of char pointers, now, not so much. Something like this looks more typical, and doesn't benefit much from UCS-4, if at all: foo.split(" ").each{|word| bar(word) }.

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 string manipulation functions didn't even exist!

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.