How to waste computer memory?

[Random832]

On Fri, Mar 18, 2016, at 03:00, Ian Kelly wrote:
> jmf has been asked this before, and as I recall he seems to feel that
> UTF-8 should be used for all purposes, ignoring the limitations of
> that encoding such as that indexing becomes a O(n) operation.

Just to play devil's advocate, here, why is it so bad for indexing to be
O(n)? Some simple caching is all that's needed to prevent it from making
iteration O(n^2), if that's what you're worried about.

Emacs' "multibyte string" type does this. (among other trickery to
represent non-unicode characters and "raw bytes" as code points above
10FFFF - raw bytes are 3FFF80-3FFFFF)