To Walter, about char[] initialization by FF

[Unknown W. Brackets]

Indeed; this is the same situation as with XML transmission over the 
web.  It contains a huge amount of redundancy, and compresses so well 
that I've seen it do better than binary-based formats.

Although, I'm afraid that most of the time this compression isn't 
necessarily automatic, and too often is not done.

-[Unknown]


> I suspect, though, that (c) might be moot since it is my understanding 
> that most actual data transmission equipment automatically compresses 
> the data stream, and so the redundancy of the UTF-8 is minimized. Text 
> itself tends to be highly compressible on top of that.
> 
> Furthermore, because of the rate of expansion and declining costs of 
> bandwidth, the cost of extra bytes is declining at the same time that 
> the cost of the inflexibility of code pages is increasing.