> [Please correct me if I'm wrong. I'm not an expert but this is how it seems to me] You're basically right, but the subtle point is that these comments are in

> [Please correct me if I'm wrong. I'm not an expert but this is how it seems to me] You're basically right, but the subtle point is that these comments are in response to lotsofcows who said, "Anything that talks Unicode can talk ASCII (although not vice versa)." The implication of "talk" is that the numbers are being encoded. qznc was trying to clarify that lotsofcows's statement is only true if the Unicode system is using an encoding which is backwards compatible with 7-bit ASCII, such as UTF-8.