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From: Ian Kelly <ian.g.kelly@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 26 Aug 2012 09:40:13 -0600
Subject: Re: Flexible string representation, unicode, typography, ...
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On Sun, Aug 26, 2012 at 5:49 AM, Steven D'Aprano
<steve+comp.lang.python@pearwood.info> wrote:
>> Sorry, you do not get it.
>>
>> The rune is an alias for int32. A sequence of runes is a sequence of
>> int32's.
>
> It certainly is not. Runes are variable-width. Here, for example, are a
> number of Go functions which return a single rune and its width in bytes:
>
> http://golang.org/pkg/unicode/utf8/

I think the documentation for those functions is simply badly worded.
The "width in bytes" it returns is not the width of the rune (which as
jmf notes is simply an alias for int32 that stores a single code
point).  It means the UTF-8 width of the character, i.e. the number of
UTF-8 bytes the function "consumed", presumably so that the caller can
then reslice the data with that many bytes fewer.