> There are other standards. Some older programming languages like C# and Java rely on UTF-16. In UTF-16, you use two or four bytes per character. It seemed like a good idea at the time ...
IIUC this isn't quite right. UTF-16 never seemed like a good idea on its own. These languages started with UCS-2 which did seem like a good idea. But then USC-2 ran out of bits and UTF-16 was the least-incompatible way to adopt Unicode.
So as I understand it UTF-16 was always a compromise for backwards compatibility.
IIUC this isn't quite right. UTF-16 never seemed like a good idea on its own. These languages started with UCS-2 which did seem like a good idea. But then USC-2 ran out of bits and UTF-16 was the least-incompatible way to adopt Unicode.
So as I understand it UTF-16 was always a compromise for backwards compatibility.