The quote, as you presented it, leaves open the question: more capable than what? Well, there's no doubt about it if you go back to my original post: more capable than ascii. Up until now, as far as I can tell, your thesis has not been that unicode is less capable than ascii, but if that's what your argument hangs on, go ahead - make that case.
What your thesis has been, up to this point, is that manipulating text as bytes is better, to the extent that doing it as unicode is harmful.
> It must simply do something better. If there were actually anything at all it did better...
It is amusing that you mentioned the burden of proof earlier, because what you have completely avoided doing so far is justify your position that manipulating bytes is better - for example, you have not answered any of the questions I posed in my previous post.
> The heart of the matter is that a Unicode codepoint sequence view of a string has no real use case.
Here we have another assertion presented without justification.
> There is no "universal principle" that we use abstractions always, regardless of whether they fit the problem...
It is about as close as anthing gets to a universal principle in software engineering, and if you want to disagree on that, go ahead, I'm ready to defend that point of view.
>... that's cargo-culting.
How about presenting an actual argument, instead of this bullshit?
Furthermore, you could take that statement out of my previous post, and it would do nothing to support the thesis you had been pushing up to that point. You seem to be seeking anything in my words that you think you can argue against, without regard to relevance - but in doing so, you might be digging a deeper hole.
> An abstraction that does no work is, ceteris paribus, worse than not having it at all.
Your use of a Latin phrase does not alter the fact that you are still making unsubstantiated claims.
I guarantee you there will be a quick counterexample to demonstrate that the claimed use-case is incorrect. There always is.
You may review the gish gallop in the other branch of this thread for inspiration.
A Gish gallop is not, of course, a sound way to arrive at any sort of truth. Anyone employing the technique is either unaware of that, or is being duplicitous (my guess is that Gish never really understood that it is bogus.)
Meanwhile, those questions are still waiting to be milked, so to speak...
The heart of the matter is that a Unicode codepoint sequence view of a string has no real use case.
There is no "universal principle" that we use abstractions always, regardless of whether they fit the problem; that's cargo-culting. An abstraction that does no work is, ceteris paribus, worse than not having it at all.