The first networked computers predate unicode by several decades. Back then, the word length could be 8 but not neccesarily. All sorts of different encodings existed and a given common standard wasn't yet agreed upon

It's not like internet standards don't know there are other languages, it's just that they documented how things were done at the time. Some legacy has remained ever since.

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josephg 2 days ago | parent [-]

Sure, but most code doesn't interact with raw packets. Legacy, ascii-only internet standards probably make up much less than 1% of new lines of code written today. Programming languages should support this use case. But not at the expense of the other 99% of software.

Unicode-aware strings are the right choice for 99% of code. The last 1% should be a special case.

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tosti 2 days ago | parent [-]

Raw packets? Legacy? Have you've ever talked to anything over a socket?

You don't need a raw socket to get into trouble. You also don't need a "legacy" protocol.

	▲	josephg a day ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, plenty of times. But I’m usually using raw byte arrays via protobuf or something similar. ASCII only text protocols are rare. Most devs don’t reimplement them from scratch. I’d wager most code is application code, where UTF8 strings are a great choice.