Re:UTF-8 is a brilliant design
by necovek on Friday September 12, 2025 @10:18PM
(#45228787)
Most languages are well representable with 128 characters (7-bits) if you do not include English characters among those (eg. replace those 52 characters and some control/punctuation/symbols).
This is easily proven by the success of all the ISO-8859-*, Windows and IBM CP-* encodings, and all the *SCII (ISCII, YUSCII...) extensions — they fit one or more languages in the upper 128 characters.
It's mostly CJK out of large languages that fail to fit within 128 characters as a whole (though there are smaller languages too).
This is easily proven by the success of all the ISO-8859-*, Windows and IBM CP-* encodings, and all the *SCII (ISCII, YUSCII...) extensions — they fit one or more languages in the upper 128 characters.
It's mostly CJK out of large languages that fail to fit within 128 characters as a whole (though there are smaller languages too).