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Re:How ASCII lost and unicode won by peteri on Tuesday July 09, 2013 @08:11AM (#6012232)
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.

Re:How ASCII lost and unicode won by lucian1900 on Tuesday July 09, 2013 @08:53AM (#6012382)
Why would one not use UTF-8? You can't do byte comparisons or indexing, so all processing has to be linear anyway.