Why UTF-8/16 character encodings?

[Peter Williams]

On 31/05/13 05:07, Walter Bright wrote:
> 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!

Because they had no choice.

Peter