Why Strings as Classes?

[Christopher Wright]

superdan wrote:
> but if u have strings like today it's a no-brainer to define a class that does all that stuff. u can then use that class whenever you feel. it would be madness to put that class in the language definition. at best it's a candidate for the stdlib.

Instead, the runtime has to know how to convert between utf8, utf16, and 
utf32. Encodings are not a trivial matter, either.