codepoints

My intuition says string indices should be accessible as grapheme clusters (and, additionally, codepoints), bytes are meaningless anyway.

UTF-32 is not good for anything either, easy access to codepoints is just as useless as access to UTF-8 bytes.

Composed characters are headache, but the library to deal with them can be built on top of list of unicode codepoints (if we adopt unicode codepoints as Char).

The private use areas only encode about 137,000 codepoints (U+e000 to U+f8ff & U+f0000 to U+10ffff) and are running out quickly.

Unless you're a Unicode fanatic, you probably won't manually edit sequences of hexadecimal codepoints.

It's unclear what an index should even return: bytes, codepoints, grapheme clusters?

Four new codepoints for Turkish ı/I and i/İ would have solved so many problems.

This surrogation scheme is actually intended for UTF-16 to use as a second-tier surrogate scheme so it can encode the same number of codepoints as UTF-8 and UTF-32.

And that still only gets you codepoints.

By bytes, by codepoints or by graphemes.

Though such negative-numbered codepoints could only be used for private use in data interchange between 3rd parties if the UTF-32 was used, because neither UTF-8 (even pre-2003) nor UTF-16 could encode them.

I also think that Unicode Consortium should have been more aggressive in segregating (and discouraging the general use of) legacy compatibility features/codepoints and the stuff that is actually supposed to be used.