This is similar to the "kill Hitler" time travel joke [1], it's easy to say things would be better but all we know for sure is that they would be different. Instead of `char` we'd have strings that were `struct` and we'd STILL have a ton of different string formats because of lengths and character formats. (Bonus problem: are the lengths in bytes, or in chars?)

[1] http://www.tor.com/stories/2011/08/wikihistory