> This is irrelevant, as it's extremely difficult to find any two pieces of software that are "functionally the same" Yes, indeed. You're illustrating is why t

> This is irrelevant, as it's extremely difficult to find any two pieces of software that are "functionally the same" Yes, indeed. You're illustrating is why the post I replied to is a straw man argument. Most software, as you say, is not functionally the same anymore. > string localization should have no perceptible performance impact Yes, my argument was that we got localization without a noticeable perf impact. But it does consume memory, bandwidth and code size, and as you correctly point out, a small amount of compute. I would venture to suggest that rendering Asian fonts is a tad more involved than an O(1) hash table lookup. Localization is just one of hundreds of features we have standard now that we didn't have 20 years ago.