On: Should UTF-16 be considered harmful?

[jensnockert]

You mean that it is not ASCII compatible?

Also, Mac OS X, Java, .Net, Qt, ICU... there are a lot of support for UTF-16, for other reasons than backwards compatibility. Processing UTF-16 is easier in many situations.

[nitrogen → jensnockert]

Processing UTF-16 would only be easier if you have a valid byte-order mark and/or know the endianness in advance and you can guarantee that no surrogate pairs exist. Otherwise the same pitfalls exist as when processing UTF-8, plus the endianness issue and the possibility of UTF-16 programmers not knowing about surrogate pairs.

[anaisbetts → nitrogen]

What you're describing is UCS-2, not UTF-16. That's why the latter is frustrating to deal with

[sp332 → jensnockert]

UTF-16 is not ASCII-compatible, if that's what you were asking.