Strange, I remember reading that the extra storage space required for regular 7-bit characters is what crippled the adoption of Unicode. Prior to UTF-8, I mean...
I wonder if the serviette (napkin) which Ken Thompson plotted UTF-8 on has a home in the MIT museum somewhere... =) On 23 July 2017 at 22:39, Ralph Corderoy <ra...@inputplus.co.uk> wrote: > Hi John, > > > What's the rationale for choosing UTF-16 in the first place? > > History. Microsoft plumped for UCS-2, both UCS-2BE and UCS-2LE I think. > That's a fixed width; two bytes per rune. When that became > insufficient, UTF-16 was a backwards-compatible upgrade AIUI. > > -- > Cheers, Ralph. > https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy > >
