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@dalias @krans so you have a system that uses arbitrarily large numbers. You can store those numbers as very large words or dwords or you can encode them into smaller serially-decoded parcels.
UTF does that.
Each UTF byte is either the start of a larger value or a follow-up value (based on the high bit being set). This means the first 127 characters in ASCII and UTF-8 match by the way.
Small numbers? fewer bytes to encode. Large numbers? more bytes. UTF=variable. UCS=fixed.