> There are utf-7, utf-8, utf-16 (JS uses that) and utf-32 (C# uses that) in use. And more exist that abandoned. Javascript is just UCS-2 that exposes UTF-16 i

> There are utf-7, utf-8, utf-16 (JS uses that) and utf-32 (C# uses that) in use. And more exist that abandoned. Javascript is just UCS-2 that exposes UTF-16 internals (eg. surrogates) for your application logic to process if you want to do anything correct with the string (other than pass it around unmodified). Maybe it's "abandoned" in the sense that UTF-16 nominally supersedes it, but yea, it's actually just UCS-2. Lots of the stuff in early 1990s used UCS-2 (eg NTFS). This also goes to your point about living with "wrong" decisions from the past due to compatibility and inertia. Nobody knew we needed more than 2^16 code points (bet most of you don't know about the Kangxi Dictionary...)