Getting tired of people calling things "useless". Clearly I have a usecase for fixed width text encodings. Source code manipulation is frequently Unicode aware

Getting tired of people calling things "useless". Clearly I have a usecase for fixed width text encodings. Source code manipulation is frequently Unicode aware but doesn't care about combinations or things outside of a strict subset of Unicode to modify lexing control flow. Being able to store (and later refer to) character offsets in the source code is a plus because they'll only ever occur in places where the strict subset is enforced. This is especially true of languages with line-only comments, etc, where different writing systems being used won't affect the error message information. Like I said, there are a few useful cases where having a fixed width encoding is beneficial. It's less helpful to the discussion to assert you know better for every case, ever.