Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
I know it is customary, but why? Are there real technical reasons why any other way would be a really bad idea or is it just based on the history of encoding and backwards compatibility? In addition, what are the dangers of not using UTF-8, but some other encoding (most notably, UTF-16)?
Edit : By interacting, I mostly mean the shell and libc.
Partly because the file systems expect NUL (‘\0’) bytes to terminate file names, so UTF-16 would not work well. You’d have to modify a lot of code to make that change.