[erlang-questions] byte() vs. char() use in documentation

[David Mercer]

On Tuesday, May 03, 2011, Anthony Shipman wrote:

> I think a more complete design would represent a character as a binary
> that is
> a UTF8 encoding of its code points. A string would then be a deep list
> of
> these binaries.

How is that superior than representing a character by a single integer
representing the Unicode codepoint, a string by a list of characters?  You
can always use unicode:characters_to_binary/1 to convert to a UTF-8 binary
if you wish.