John.Cowan wrote:
>Per Bothner wrote:
> > Random accesses to a position in a string that has not
> > been previously accessed is not in itself useful.
>
> Another use case, archaic as it may seem, is still important: processing
> fixed-length fields in text files.

Such applications are probably not using Unicode ...
In Unicode-land, the concept is pretty meaningless: are you
talking about
(1) a fixed display width (number of columns) - if so the
numbers of "characters" (or bytes") is unrelated to the display
width; or
(2) a fixed number of bytes in a file - if so immediately fire anybody
who writes any new applications doing this!  (And "legacy" applications
will not support Unicode.)
--
	--Per Bothner
xxxxxx@bothner.com   http://per.bothner.com/