this post was submitted on 09 May 2026
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Mhh today I learned. That's wild. I would have thought that any sane person would allow only 7-bit ASCII for the source code, and forward-compatible character sets in strings (every standard iteration being allowed to add characters, but not remove them).
At the time that C was designed, ASCII was not a universal standard. It was one encoding competing with other encodings.
Ok that's a fair point I had overlooked. Thanks for explaining.