 could, and, in fact, early implementors wanted to be able to store their Unicode code points in high-endian or low-endian mode, whichever their particular CPU was fastest at, and lo, it was evening and it was morning and there were already <em>two</em> ways to store Unicode. So the people were forced to come up with the bizarre convention of storing a FE FF at the beginning of every Unicode string; this is called a <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/intl/unicode_42jv.