I wouldn't necessarily blame it on the unicode consortium but rather on the assumption that a character in a programming language should conform to the notion o

I wouldn't necessarily blame it on the unicode consortium but rather on the assumption that a character in a programming language should conform to the notion of a character in UCS-4 or some other unicode encoding. From a programming language perspective, I think it would be ideal if strings could always be viewed as lists of encoding independent characters, such that reversing this list is equivalent to reversing the string. If you want to be able to maintain a one-to-one mapping to unicode, you will need to use unique characters for an "ä" and an "a with combining-diaeresis" but ideally that should be hidden from the user of the language. Thus, in my ideal world, both "LATIN-SMALL-LETTER-O-WITH-DIAERESIS" and "LATIN-SMALL-LETTER-O COMBINING-DIAERESIS" would each be one single element of a list of characters which is a string.