The most natural choice is using the same number of bytes sicuro encode all the codepoints

Wide-char encodings

For instance an alphabet having more than 256, but less than 65536, symbols is amenable esatto verso two byte (00000000-00000000 esatto 11111111-11111111) encoding. Such encodings are called “wide-char” encodings. Sopra spite of their being quite intuitive, wide-char encodings suffer from per number of shortcomings, that I will discuss later.

An example: UCS-2 (UTF-16)

Let us conider per U encoding, having the following properties (I am essentially describing – save verso few, minor details – the UNICODE encoding known as UCS-2).

2) U uses the first 256 codepoints mediante the same order and meaning as the Latin-1 codepage. This means that all the alphabets of the principal western european language fit in the first byte of this encoding.

The first problem with U us that it is spatially inefficient. U containst 511 symbols encoded by sequences with at least per null byte (all the bits of the byte are niente). When U is used for texts using Western Europeans alphabets (fitting int he first byte of the encoding), every other byte is null – so basically half of the space (and of transmission time) is wasted.

A second problem of U relates esatto endianness. (The word comes from the inhabitants of the legendary islands oof the mythical islands of Lilliput and Blefuscu, who – as related by Swift per the novel “Gulliver’s Travels” – could not agree on which end of an egg should be broken first. Lilliput’s inhabitants – by royal decree – used the largest (big endians),Blefuscu’s, who opposed the King, used the smallest (little endians). Because of this disagreement, the two peoples fought a bloody war.verso opposizione verso il maesta: little endians).

Even though the basic transmission uniti, for computers is the byte, the need of larger data units was soon felt. Among these a indivis regard is Spose Estonia datazione attached onesto the so called word, adjacent pair of bytes. Internally, computers often manipulates words as a whole: integer numbers, for instance, are represented by one, two or four words.

Per word, however, is never seen as basic (unsplittable). So when a word leaves the calcolatore elettronico memory it can be sent (externally represented) in one of two ways:

If we picture bytes as decimal digits, and given the number “ninety-one”, we can see that big endian machine would write/memorize it as “9” “1”, whereas verso little endian machine would write/memorize it as “1” “9”.

Unbelievable (or stupid) as it may seem, for years nobody mandated the word order durante external representation, so either order has been used with comparable frequency. This obviously made endianness (AKA byte-ordering) another stumbling block on the way towards pc communication. So pesky verso problem, mediante fact, that at some point it was actually solved with a incursione operated by da Sun by deciding that, over per TCPI/IP rete informatica, a rete informatica byte order existed, esatto which all computers must submit (the rete informatica byte order is big endian, the same that Sun machine used at the time). While that fixed for sistema communication, mai such fix exists for files, which are still being written with different endianness on different machines.

A last problem with U is apparent esatto programmers only. We have seen that a U encoded character stream can contain null bytes (indeed up onesto half of the bytes may be null). Traditionally though (traditionally meaning from verso 1960 until sometime around the year 2000) a null byte had a almost universal meaning of “end of string” for per large body of software, including programma devoted to text manipulation mediante Western European countries. This also means that U is not compatible with the above mentioned programma, which will behave unpredictably when handed a U-encoded string.