string is rarely useful as a function argument

[Walter Bright]

On 12/30/2011 11:55 AM, Timon Gehr wrote:
> Me too. I think the way we have it now is optimal.

Consider your X macro implementation. Strip out the utf.stride code and use 
plain indexing - it will not break the code in any way. The naive implementation 
still works correctly with ASCII and UTF-8.

That's not true for any other multibyte encoding, which is why UTF-8 is inspired 
genius.