I wasn't stating my opinion in my last post, just facts/clarifications. But yes, I agree that UTF-8 would be a better default than ASCII unless someone provide

I wasn't stating my opinion in my last post, just facts/clarifications. But yes, I agree that UTF-8 would be a better default than ASCII unless someone provides hard evidence that encoding/decoding is a severe performance bottleneck in most real applications. (even then, I'd default to the "correct", not the fastest)