Why UTF-8/16 character encodings?

[Walter Bright]

On 5/24/2013 3:42 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> I tried writing language-agnostic text-processing programs in C/C++
> before the widespread adoption of Unicode.

One of the first, and best, decisions I made for D was it would be Unicode front 
to back.

At the time, Unicode was poorly supported by operating systems and lots of 
software, and I encountered some initial resistance to it. But I believed 
Unicode was the inevitable future.

Code pages, Shift-JIS, EBCDIC, etc., should all be terminated with prejudice.