I think that will just overcomplicate things. Right now, all Strings in Pharo are unicode strings.
Cool. I didn't realise that. But to be pedantic, which unicode encoding?
Should I presume from Sven's "UTF-8 encoding step" comment below
and the WideString class comment "This class represents the array of 32 bit wide characters"
that the WideString encoding is UTF-32? So should its comment be updated to advise that?
Not really, Pharo Strings are a collection of Characters, each of which is a Unicode code point (yes a 32 bit one).
An encoding projects this rather abstract notion onto a sequence of bytes,
UTF-32 (ZnUTF32Encoder, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-32) is for example endian dependent.
Read the first part of
https://ci.inria.fr/pharo-contribution/job/EnterprisePharoBook/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/book-result/Zinc-Encoding-Meta/Zinc-Encoding-Meta.html