Seems obvious, ASCII had an unused bit, so you use it. Why did they even bother with UTF-16 and -32 then?
Because the original design assumed that 16 bits are enough to encode everything worth encoding, hence UCS2 (not UTF-16, yet) being the easiest and most straightforward way to represent things.
Ah ok. Well even then, you end up spending 16 bits for every ASCII character.
Because the original design assumed that 16 bits are enough to encode everything worth encoding, hence UCS2 (not UTF-16, yet) being the easiest and most straightforward way to represent things.
Ah ok. Well even then, you end up spending 16 bits for every ASCII character.