this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023
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It's a joke.
UTF-16 already exists, which doesn't favor Roman characters as much, but UTF-8 is more popular because it is backword compatible with the legacy ASCII.
UTF-32 also exists which has exactly equal length representation for every character.
But the thing that equalizes languages is compression.
Yes, a text written in Cyrillic with UTF-8 will take more space than a Roman language, easily double. However this extra space is much more easily compressed by an algorithm like GZIP.
So after compression, the two compressed texts will then be similarly sized and much smaller than UTF-16 or UTF-32.
Besides most text on the average computer is either within some configuration file (which tend to use latin script), or within some SGML derived format which has a bunch of latin characters in it. For network transmission most things will use HTML, XML or JSON and use English language property names even in countries that don't speak English (see Yandex's and Baidu's APIs for example).
No one is moving large amounts of .txt files around.
You've never worked in finance then. All our systems at work do nothing but move large amounts of txt files around.
That said, many of our clients still don't support utf-8 so its all ascii and non-latin alphabets are screwed. They can't even handle characters 128-255 so even stuff like £ is unsupported.
Ah, yes, I heard about that sort of thing. Some bank getting a GDPR complaint because they couldn't correct the spelling of someone's name, because their system uses EBCDIC.
Probably not an issue then...
Its not a joke. I worked for a big european bank network and the software there didn't know how to translate from EBCDIC to UTF8 because none of the devs writing the software knew enough of the other side (mainframe vs PC) to realise this was an issue.
Their solution was "if the file has a ? in it when we receive it, it's probably a £". Which of course completely breaks down the day you have any other untranslated character.
I spent fucking weeks explaining this issue and why this was abominable, but apparently this wasn't enough of an issue for people to fix it. Go figure...