UTF-8 is indeed a genius design. But of course it’s crucially dependent on the decision for ASCII to use only 7 bits, which even in 1963 was kind of an odd choice.
Was this just historical luck? Is there a world where the designers of ASCII grabbed one more bit of code space for some nice-to-haves, or did they have code pages or other extensibility in mind from the start? I bet someone around here knows.
Was this just historical luck? Is there a world where the designers of ASCII grabbed one more bit of code space for some nice-to-haves, or did they have code pages or other extensibility in mind from the start? I bet someone around here knows.