Why UTF-8/16 character encodings?

[Vladimir Panteleev]

On Saturday, 25 May 2013 at 11:07:54 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> If you want to split a string by ASCII whitespace (newlines, 
>> tabs and spaces), it makes no difference whether the string is 
>> in ASCII or UTF-8 - the code will behave correctly in either 
>> case, variable-width-encodings regardless.
> Except that a variable-width encoding will take longer to 
> decode while splitting, when compared to a single-byte encoding.

No. Are you sure you understand UTF-8 properly?