Well, remember that "characters", the precursor
for bytes, are really standardized icons:  They
are little images which are used so often that
they receive and received special support by
hardware -- in the old days of 3270s and the
like, by being mapped into a matrix of bytes on
a screen.

If sufficient screen resolution were available --
with enough refresh horsepower to back it up --
wouldn't we, in the limit, want each element of
such a "string array" to be one of these things?
One probably would want to bound their maximum
size in some way, but I would think the units
to be used in such bounding wouldn't be pixels
or bytes but something like points or even
millimeters.

If, for instance, one needed to convey a 
language which wasn't at all character based --
say, Egyptian hieroglyphics perhaps?  -- don't
you think the string model would just break?
I don't think it could be used for general
glyphs, because they would suffer kerning and
other ills a good deal.

  --Jan


>>I dont understand how an Array is useful as a general String. They are both
>>Collections, and that is about it.
>
>You wanted something that could maintain and manipulate a sequence of 
>randomly accessed, but generalized objects.  An Array seems the 
>broadest non-abstract class in the hierarchy that does this.
>
>My question, of course is this.  What is a GeneralizedString other 
>than an Array of objects?  Perhaps it is that the collection is all 
>of a generally homogenous class, say, of instances of a subclass of 
>GeneralizedCharacter?  Perhaps we will require ALL characters of the 
>array to be instances of one particular class?  What is it about the 
>GeneralizedCharacter that distinguishes it from, say, Object, clearly 
>the most general version? 

[snip]