> The Python problem is amusing. Python 3 has three representations of strings internally (1-byte, 2-byte, and 4-byte) and promotes them to a wider form when necessary. This is mostly to support string indexing. It probably would have been better to use UTF-8, and create an index array for the string when necessary.

It's especially amusing because on Python 3 strings internally cache their utf-8 equivalent if it was used once.