"A Programmer's Introduction to Unicode"

[Richard Wordingham]

On Mon, 13 Mar 2017 19:18:00 +0000
Alastair Houghton <alastair at alastairs-place.net> wrote:

> IMO, returning code points by index is a mistake.  It over-emphasises
> the importance of the code point, which helps to continue the notion
> in some developers’ minds that code points are somehow “characters”.
> It also leads to people unnecessarily using UCS-4 as an internal
> representation, which seems to have very few advantages in practice
> over UTF-16.

The problem is that UTF-16 based code can very easily overlook the
handling of surrogate pairs, and one very easily get confused over what
string lengths mean.

Richard.