Why UTF-8/16 character encodings?

[Jakob Ovrum]

On Wednesday, 29 May 2013 at 22:44:17 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> (Also note that I meant using ASCII, not necessarily english.)

I don't understand the logic behind this. Surely this is the 
worst combination; severely crippled ability to use non-English 
languages (yes, even for European languages), yet non-speakers of 
those languages still don't have a clue what it means.