I think what he's getting at is that whatever program is reading the text must be prepared to read UTF-8 and not just ASCII. Sure, the underlying data is the s

I think what he's getting at is that whatever program is reading the text must be prepared to read UTF-8 and not just ASCII. Sure, the underlying data is the same, but the data type is not the same; analogously, a byte with the decimal value of 65 might be the number 65 if cast as an integer, but might be the character 'A' if cast as a char.