Why UTF-8/16 character encodings?

[Walter Bright]

On 5/30/2013 4:24 AM, Manu wrote:
> We don't all know English. Plenty of people don't.
> I've worked a lot with Sony and Nintendo code/libraries, for instance, it almost
> always looks like this:
>
> {
>    // E: I like cake.
>    // J: ケーキが好きです。
>    player.eatCake();
> }
>
> Clearly someone doesn't speak English in these massive codebases that power an
> industry worth 10s of billions.

Sure, but the code itself is written using ASCII!