Why UTF-8/16 character encodings?

[Joakim]

On Sunday, 26 May 2013 at 16:54:53 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> 1. Make extraordinary claims
What is extraordinary about "UTF-8 is shit?"  It is obviously so.

> 2. Refuse to back up said claims with small examples because "I 
> don't write toy code"
I never refused small examples.  I have provided several analyses 
of how a single-byte encoding would compare to UTF-8, along with 
listing optimizations that make it much faster.  I finally 
refused to analyze Teoh's examples because he accused me of 
trolling and demanded code as the only possible explanation.

> 3. Refuse to back up said claims with elaborate examples 
> because "It will
> take too long"
You are confused.  What I said is "I don't write toy code, 
non-toy code would take too long, and you wouldn't understand it 
anyway."

The whole demand for code is idiotic anyway.

If I outlined TCP/IP as a packet-switched network and briefly 
sketched what the header might look like and the queuing 
algorithms that I might use, I can just imagine you saying, "But 
there's no code... how can I possibly understand what you're 
saying without any code?"  If you can't understand networking 
without seeing working code, you're not equipped to understand it 
anyway, same here.

> 4. Use arrogant tone throughout thread, imply that you're 
> smarter than the creators of UTF, and creators and long-time 
> contributors of D (never contribute code to D yourself)
Hey, if the shoe fits. :)

I actually had a lot of respect for Walter till I read this 
thread.  I can only assume that his past experience with code 
pages was so maddening that he cannot be rational on the subject 
of going to any single-byte encoding that would be similar, same 
with others griping about code pages above.  I also don't think 
he and others are paying much attention to the various points I'm 
raising, hence his recent claim that I wouldn't handle Chinese, 
when I addressed that from the beginning.

Or it could just be that I'm much smarter than everybody else in 
this thread, ;) I can't rule it out given the often silly 
responses I've been getting.

> Result: 70-post thread
>
> Conclusion: Successful troll is successful :)
Conclusion: Vladimir trolls me because he doesn't understand what 
I'm talking about, which is why he doesn't raise a single 
technical point in this post.