> Three bytes are enough to fit nearly any of the chars in use in any language This is not a fixed length encoding scheme, it is a subset of UTF-8, which is a

> Three bytes are enough to fit nearly any of the chars in use in any language This is not a fixed length encoding scheme, it is a subset of UTF-8, which is a variable length encoding designed so that the most common characters only take one byte of storage. As a consequence you do not get 2^24 possible characters in three bytes, you get much less than that (less than 2^16 actually), and the benefit is compatibility and compression. To represent the full range, UTF-8 requires up to four bytes, even though 21 bits or three bytes would do for a fixed length encoding. UTF-8 is far more efficient in storage and transfer bandwidth than a fixed length encoding would be without further compression, to the point where using a fixed UCS-4/UTF-32 style encoding is an effective way to nearly quadruple the memory requirements of a large class of programs.