HyperTalk existed before unicode, however it's conceivable that a modern implementation would return... the number of actual characters in a string.

For contrast, JaveScript's .length definitely does not count the number of characters, it returns the count of UTF-16 units, which for Emojis yields an incorrect result.

My point being that the conveniences we all enjoy with `.length` come with subtle gotchas that we overcome as devs but are perhaps not necessarily as user-friendly as a more long-winded approach.