Comment by cryptonector

4 years ago

Quite true. One of the things Windows got very wrong was UCS-2 and, later, UTF-16. So did JavaScript.

And macOS, and Java, and Qt, and ...

It's almost as if it was universally seen as a good idea at the time. ~

  • Yes. I'm a bit surprised it took so long for someone to come up with something better. But if someone had tried and had come up with anything other than Rob Pike's UTF-8, we might still be sad. Sometimes you have to make mistakes before you know that's what they were.

    • The problem is that everyone wanted to keep simple array semantics for text, and that's not really workable with full scope of Unicode (even if you have 21-bit code points exposed, Runes, etc.)

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