Think you're right. The article could with a rewrite as Unicode used to be 16 bit until 1996 (according to Wikipedia) which explains why Java/Windows are really

Think you're right. The article could with a rewrite as Unicode used to be 16 bit until 1996 (according to Wikipedia) which explains why Java/Windows are really UTF-16 based. The more interesting question is if you're designing a new operating system would you pick UTF-8 or UTF-32 as the basis of your character system. Bearing in mind you need to normalise strings anyway for comparison purposes the general space efficiencies for UTF-8 for most systems seem tempting.