now we're treated like terrorists and crimminals, so much better

You bring up an often-argued completely silly scenario.

Neither the government nor the U.S. armed forces would survive the use of such weapons on the populace. The military would fall apart.

news for you, most state constitutions already state that. Mine does.

FWIW, a republic CAN be a democracy. At least in principle, and if you aren't too picky about exact definitions. (I'm not asserting that the US states were ever more of a democracy than was classical Athens, however.)

It will if you're using C or C++.

FWIW, *most* of the text I'm working with is ASCII-7, but some of it isn't. Short quotation in, e.g., Greek. I need to be able to count the chars, etc. Utf-32 is an immense waste of space...and I already expect to be doing a lot of paging because of excessive memory use.

A republic can be a democracy, or not. A democracy can be a republic, or not. You don't seem to know what "democracy" or "republic" means - why should anyone listen to you discuss the merits or problems of either?

"Republic" and "democracy" clearly mean different things to what you understand. You might want to head on over to a dictionary. A republic simply means a country that is not ruled by a dynastic leader. A democracy simply means a country in which the people choose the leaders. Clearly the two are not mutually exclusive, and the US is both, albeit to various lengths.

How can the US go back to being "a state in which supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives, and which has an elected or nominated president rather than a monarch"? Do you even know what "republic" means?

Your answer is very illuminating. In most democracies there are a host of parties which people vote for, and which have a good chance of becoming important in the policy-making of the country in question. The fact you think that isn't the case speaks volumes about how you view politics, and if your thinking is in any way common, explains why the current US situation came about. You seem to think the joke of US democracy is somehow normal.

"Early 2000 called ... yadda yadda ..."

Seriously - you're either a terrible programmer, a troll, or both.

It's not a republic any more? The US has a dynastic leader, akin to a royal or dictatorial family? Weird. Or, maybe, you just don't know what the word "republic" means. That would make more sense.

You don't even know what these words mean, yet get so irate when people use them correctly. What's wrong with your brain? A republic means a country without a dynastic leader. That's it. It might have democracy, it might not, it has nothing to do with it.

Which is the very definition of oligarchy... your point? :)

One guy saying something does not an oligarchy make, regardless of who that guy is.

C++ (and do a lesser extent C) lose support because of their extremely poor support for utf8. And the absurd part of it is that they could easily do a good job. Utf8 is just a byte array with various routines to interpret the code. Glibc does a reasonable job for a C library...not ideal, but reasonable.

All the array needs is a way to address a chunk by character # rather than by byte #, a way to copy of a character or a slice of chars, and a way to determine the general character classification of any character. Also a few methods: first(), last(), hasnext(), hasprior(), next() and prior(). And these all "sort of" exist, except getting the general character classification. (Do note that these functions need to operate on utf-8 characters rather than on bytes.) But several different ways of doing this are already known. Vala, e.g., handles it without difficulty, and is able to emit C code (using Glibc libraries).

So it's not a programming difficulty that's holding things up. It's the standards bodies...or, perhaps, some members of them.

But I've looked at C++11, and it is not a satisfactory answer. Vala has a good answer. D (Digital Mars D) has a different good answer. Even Python3 has a pretty good answer. (I don't like that in Python you can't determine memory allocation within the string.) Also Racket, etc. But C++ doesn't.