Why do you decode ? (Seriously)

[Walter Bright]

On 8/2/2012 11:42 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> I like a lot this idea of an "minimally decoded" character that's isomorphic
> with UTF-32 but much cheaper to extract. (We could use ulong if they add 5- and
> 6-byte characters). I wonder if people came up with this and gave it a name. If
> not, I'd say we call such a number an "olsh".

Yeah, it's too bad the inventors of UTF8 didn't think of this.