The reason for char being 16 bits is that the JLS predates Unicode 2.0 (1996), which added 32 bit codepoints. At that time, UCS-2 was widely believed to be suff

The reason for char being 16 bits is that the JLS predates Unicode 2.0 (1996), which added 32 bit codepoints. At that time, UCS-2 was widely believed to be sufficient to represent anything "international."