s usually solved by the messy system called DBCS, the "double byte character set" in which <em>some</em> letters were stored in one byte and others took two. It was easy to move forward in a string, but dang near impossible to move backwards. Programmers were encouraged not to use s++ and s-- to move backwards and forwards, but instead to call functions such as Windows' AnsiNext and AnsiPrev which knew how to deal with the whole mess.</p>

<p>But still, most people just pretended that a byte was a charact