Comment by p_l
4 years ago
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.)
4 years ago
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.)
On the plus side, because Unix was so ASCII-based, it couldn't easily make the jump to UCS-2/wchar_t. I suspect this was ultimately the motivation that led to UTF-8 (both, IBM's first attempt and Rob Pike's winner). Being late to the game sometimes means you're more prepared.