“a language-blessed string type”
But if you don’t want to change the meaning of string, then you can already do what you want today, right?
C/C++ is much older
caml (heavy) dates to the 80s; caml-light (the lineal ancestor of ocaml) came out in 1991. caml-light predates unicode (practically speaking – maybe somebody was coming up with a standard in 1991, but it was a dream in some standards committee’s eyes)
did you happen to work in an English-speaking country
I started programming in the 1980s, in the USA. But I spent 1991-94 in France (INRIA) and there also, “character” meant “byte”. It was only after Java’s prevalence that people started thinking of "char’ as “short”.