Well, if you're honest, anything about encoding is a hack :) Not that I'm a fan of UTF-16, but I once heard UTF-8 described as "one of the most elegant hacks i

Well, if you're honest, anything about encoding is a hack :) Not that I'm a fan of UTF-16, but I once heard UTF-8 described as "one of the most elegant hacks in computer science", and I think I agree there ;) Edit: Another interesting contender would be KOI8-R, as AFAIK setting its most significant bit to 0 and interpreting it as ASCII mostly results in readable text.