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When people say "text files are universal" what they really mean is 8-bit ascii is all text files should be.

• krapp 12y ago
  That's not what i'm saying at all. I'm not saying text files are universal, or that they should only be ASCII, i'm saying text is (practically) universal. No one owns "text" as a format, or a medium of communication. No one has to pay a license fee in order to use "text." There's no "text" working group which makes the one tool that anyone can use to display "text" or pass "text" around. Complain all you want about unicode support, or the lack thereof, there are a million different uses for character sets, which means textual communication is likely to be around in ten or twenty years, which means support for text-based programming is more future-proof. The encoding used is really entirely irrelevant to the point i am (apparently failing) to make. Source code isn't merely a way to pass instructions to a compiler, it's also a way of preserving knowledge, both technical and historical, and I believe that making that accessible to as many people as possible is important. It is a means of communication between humans as well - and I believe making it easy to facilitate this communication is important.