Re: Java/Unicode brain damage

[David Brownell <david-b@pacbell.net>]

> >Nah, people complain enough about wasted space ... admittedly
> >there's a religous war on whether (in C terms) "wchar_t" should
> >be 16 bits or 32.
> 
> Developers do waste time optimizing for space, I'll grant you, but
> nowadays people rarely complain because space optimization
> doesn't really matter anymore, certainly not for text.

Exactly the heresy I was referring to!  Not only does space matter
in small systems (Linux PDAs anyone?) but it also matters at the
level of hardware:  cache memory isn't growing very quickly, and
certainly not as fast as the cost of data cache misses.