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As a frequent user of Unicode, for Chinese and Japanese, I sorta go along with it, but there's no arguing that we'd be closer to flying cars and jetpack commute
by microcolonel 6y ago
As a frequent user of Unicode, for Chinese and Japanese, I sorta go along with it, but there's no arguing that we'd be closer to flying cars and jetpack commutes if computers just used ASCII.
Barring that, we could have all used UTF-8, but windows really screwed that up, and none of the arguments for 16-bit alignment vs 8-bit alignment for processing really hold water.
- arp242 6y agoMicrosoft implemented UTF-16 before UTF-8 was even invented, and certainly before it came in to widespread use.
- microcolonel 6y agoTechnically speaking no, they didn't have UTF-16 but rather UCS-2. UTF-8 was fully specified in 1992, and called UTF-8 in 1993, while it took until 1996 before UTF-16 was specified; whereas Windows NT 3.1 was released with UCS-2 in 1993.