PHP and P++

Is it 47, or is it '/'? The latter smacks of "one character set to rule them all", because 47 is 'å' in certain dialects of EBCDIC and can be part of a multibyte character in SJIS.

> which - coincidentally - makes everyone bend over backwards to get support for the characters his language is written in except people from the USA

To the extent that's true, it's less true than any of the systems that preceded it, and one character set to rule them all seems to be the best way to reduce that problem. UNIX basically assumes that whatever character set is being used, it's a superset of ASCII, which can hardly be the fault of Unicode that was created 20 years later. Heck, in 1998, simply supporting 8-bit characters was a release goal for Debian Hamm, because many Un*x utilities didn't out of the box. That is, you could have any character set you want, as long as it's ASCII.

On any of the pre-Unicode European solutions, an Estonian named Tõnisson would be out of luck in adding his correct name to a document that French and Germans had already added their names to; one byte worked for Western Europe, and who wanted to waste more space for Estonians with names like Tõnisson? If you were lucky enough to be using something that supported ISO-2022 (i.e. someone from East Asia was probably involved), the Estonian could type his name, but not actually search safely for names, as Päts could be encoded various ways, depending on whether a German or an Estonian entered the name.

And - coincidentally - Unicode was the first and usually only character set for hundreds of languages around the world. Speakers of small, less powerful, languages like Lakota or Greenlandic or Xhosa had to resort to font hacks to get any support for the language at all, whereas now it comes free with a decent-sized Unicode font.