[erlang-questions] Strings as Lists

[tsuraan]

Why does erlang internally represent strings as lists?  In every language
I've used other than Java, a string is a sequence of octets, just like
Erlang's binary type.  I know that you can represent a string efficiently by
using <<"string">> rather than just "string", but why doesn't erlang do this
by default?  Is it just because pre-12B binary handling wasn't as efficient
as list handling, or is Erlang intended to support UTF-32?

Thanks for any input!
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