Because the original design assumed that 16 bits are enough to encode everything... | Hacker News

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int_19h 9 months ago | parent | context | favorite | on: UTF-8 is a brilliant design

Because the original design assumed that 16 bits are enough to encode everything worth encoding, hence UCS2 (not UTF-16, yet) being the easiest and most straightforward way to represent things.

frollogaston 9 months ago [–]

Ah ok. Well even then, you end up spending 16 bits for every ASCII character.

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