Doug, > Most likely because no modern computer uses a 3-byte (24-bit) internal > processing unit, and because it would be false economy for real-world > Unicode text (see (1) and (2) above).
What would be worse is to have an implementation like the old IBM 360 computers where the 24 bit addresses had to be on full word (32 bit) boundaries so they used the high order byte to store flags and other data. Carl
