I have no desire, but a MS Blogger named Ryan Myers is going nuts by developing his own string class. Building a better mousetrap or however the saying goes.
He discusses the Unicode standard at depth, and then describes his reasoning for trying to create a string class that better handles true Unicode strings. Interesting history, and could be important if you have to do any localization in your projects.
Strings have gotten a lot more complex since the char *.
Encodings in Strings are Evil Things (Part 1)
Encodings in Strings are Evil Things (Part 2)
Encodings in Strings are Evil Things (Part 3)
Encodings in Strings are Evil Things (Part 4)
There’s going to be more parts, so keep checking his blog if you want to read the conclusion.