[Paul Prescod]
... Consider that computer memory is growing much faster than textual data. People's text processing techniques get more and more "wasteful" because it is now almost always possible to load the entire "text" into memory at once.
Indeed, the entire text of the Bible fits in a corner of my year-old box's RAM, even at 32 bits per character.
I remember how some text editors used to boast that they only loaded your text "on demand".
Well, they still do -- fancy editors use fancy data structures, so that, e.g., inserting characters at the start of the file doesn't cause a 50Mb memmove each time. Response time is still important, but I'd wager relatively insensitive to basic character size (you need tricks that cut factors of 1000s off potential worst cases to give the appearance of instantaneous results; a factor of 2 or 4 is in the noise compared to what's needed regardless).