[erlang-questions] UTF8

[Deryk Barker]

Robert Virding wrote:
> It is if they had kept of the old 9-bit bytes (characters) from DEC-10 
> days. In those days you also had a real ctrl-key which set the 9th 
> bit. :-)

Not a universal feature of the 9-bit byte, though. I worked on all three 
Honeywell (formerly GE and Xerox) 36-bit operating systems. The 36-bit 
word was divided into four 9-bit bytes, but terminals transmitted ASCII 
and the control key had its usual function.

What was really fun was packed decimal: you could get eight 4-bit packed 
decimal digits into a 36-bit word, as they were packed two to a byte, so 
each byte consisted of 1 unused bit and two 4-bit digits.

Decoding them in an octal core dump was really fun...