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To the author of this post: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

That's the point of the post, we should not have to know anything about encoding. It should just work.

I think there are trickier issues which a programming language has to deal with. For example, concatenating 2 strings using different encoding. Conversion is required. Specifying encoding is required.

And btw, here there is a loss since all character sets are not fully covered even in UTF-16 (iirc). I am trying to recall- maybe Matz gave a details reply somewhere on the net.

> And btw, here there is a loss since all character sets are not fully covered even in UTF-16 (iirc)

If they aren't covered in UTF-16, they wouldn't be covered in UTF-8 or UCS-4 either. All modern Unicode encodings (i.e. not UCS-2) can encode exactly the same data.

I'd be curious to know which character sets Unicode doesn't cover yet a different encoding system does.

The world does not care about what you think it should be like.

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