Good technical summary. I would like to point out couple of things:
1) Most (if any?) Western Europeans does not use ASCII. (UK being an exception.)
2) There are no reason to use ASCII if your program handles any kind of textual input. Not even English can be properly represented by ACII, because it can contain foreign names, brands, loan-words etc. with non-ASCII characters. ASCII with its arbitrary 7-bit limit was invented in 1960 when computer resources were extremely limited. Always deploy Unicode, whether your application is English-only or not.
1) Most (if any?) Western Europeans does not use ASCII. (UK being an exception.)
2) There are no reason to use ASCII if your program handles any kind of textual input. Not even English can be properly represented by ACII, because it can contain foreign names, brands, loan-words etc. with non-ASCII characters. ASCII with its arbitrary 7-bit limit was invented in 1960 when computer resources were extremely limited. Always deploy Unicode, whether your application is English-only or not.