A char Is Not a Character
The prime problem with Unicode in most programming languages is that a Unicode character is not equivalent to the native char type. For instance, on many systems, a C char is one signed byte. This allows 128 characters that cover the ASCII range (barely) but fails as soon as you need an ü or an é. On other systems, the C char type is an unsigned byte that provides 256 characters. This works adequately for most Latin-alphabet languages, though different languages have to use different character sets and not all languages can be processed simultaneously. It fails completely when faced with a language such as Japanese that has more than 256 characters. This has led to the development of wide character types such as wchar. ...
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