nice property that every single code point can be stored in the same number of bytes, but, golly, even the Texans wouldn't be so bold as to waste <em>that</em> much memory.</p>

<p>And in fact now that you're thinking of things in terms of platonic ideal letters which are represented by Unicode code points, those unicode code points can be encoded in any old-school encoding scheme, too! For example, you could encode the Unicode string for Hello (U+0048 U+0065 U+006C U+006C U+006F) in ASCII, or the old OEM