Re: Should we care much about this Unicode-ish criticism?

[Larry Wall]

Russ Allbery writes:
: Particularly since extending UTF-8 to more
: than 31 bits requires breaking some of the guarantees that UTF-8 makes,
: unless I'm missing how you're encoding the first byte so as not to give it
: a value of 0xFE.

The UTF-16 BOMs, 0xFEFF and 0xFFFE, both turn out to be illegal UTF-8
in any case, so it doesn't much matter, assuming BOMs are used on
UTF-16 that has to be auto-distinguished from UTF-8.  (Doing any kind of
auto-recognition on 16-bit data without BOMs is problematic in any case.)

Larry