Counting the size of one character remains an open problem in computer science

· Boston Conman · Nov. 10, 2026, 3:21 a.m.
Summary
A few months ago, my friend Mark wrote in asking why my assembler doesn't support UTF-8. He was asking in regard to this post where one could simply assign the the value of 3.14159265358979323846 to the symbol of π. I replied back saying it would probably be more work than it was worth doing (at least for what I want out of an aseembler for an obsolete 8-bit CPU). If I were to do it correctly the amount of data required to properly support the various categories of characters would be rather lar...