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By the same token, random-access disks are a useless feature, for they can be replaced by sequential-access DECtapes that can be rewound and selectively rewritten. But at a price.
Files actually provide a fairly close analogy to the commonest means of representing Unicode strings.
Imagine a file system that implements files as streams of bytes. Now imagine that you want to read the Nth *line*. The only way to do this is to read through the file until you have encounted N-1 newlines. This is like finding the Nth character when using UTF-8 for strings.
Now imagine a file system that implements files as enumerated random-access records and uses exactly one record for each line. You can directly read the Nth line. This is like finding the Nth character when using UCS-32 for strings.
Now imagine a file system that implements files as enumerated random-access records and uses one or more record for each line. This is like using UTF-16 for strings.
Regards, Alan -- Dr Alan Watson Centro de Radioastronomía y Astrofísica Universidad Astronómico Nacional de México