The Case Against Autodecode

[Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d]

On 5/31/2016 1:20 PM, Marco Leise wrote:
> [...]

I agree. I dealt the madness of code pages, Shift-JIS, EBCDIC, locales, etc., in 
the pre-Unicode days. Despite its problems, Unicode (and UTF-8) is a major 
improvement, and I mean major.

16 years ago, I bet that Unicode was the future, and events have shown that to 
be correct.

But I didn't know which encoding would win - UTF-8, UTF-16, or UCS-2, so D bet 
on all three. If I had a do-over, I'd just support UTF-8. UTF-16 is useful 
pretty much only as a transitional encoding to talk with Windows APIs. Nobody 
uses UCS-2 (it consumes far too much memory).