"Unicode"

Sorry, I misinterpreted you. Of course it's more complicated to iterate
over strings now, but really not much more, and UTF-8 (unlike the
fixed-width multibyte encodings) is easy to resync to if you start from an
arbitrary byte, so things like binary searches in long strings are still
possible with a tiny bit of extra tweaking.

And, agreed, the ability to treat a string as a fixed-width array is
really quite unimportant: generally people iterate over strings rather
than leaping to position N. (You meant 'position' or 'offset', though,
not 'codepoint', which is entirely different. Codepoint 'access' isn't
even a particularly meaningful concept: what does it mean to 'access'
ASCII codepoint 65? Codepoints just *are*.)