 <blockquote> <p>What's the big deal about being able to support a new characterset.</p> </blockquote> <p>Unicode is not just "a new characterset". It's the character set that removes the need to think about character sets.</p> <p>How would you rather write a string containing the Euro sign?</p> <ul> <li><code>"\x80"</code>, <code>"\x88"</code>, <code>"\x9c"</code>, <code>"\x9f"</code>, <code>"\xa2\xe3"</code>, <code>"\xa2\xe6"</code>, <code>"\xa3\xe1"</code>, <code>"\xa4"</code>, <code>"\xa9\xa1"</code>, <code>"\xd9\xe6"</code>, <code>"\xdb"</code>, or <code>"\xff"</code> depending upon the encoding.</li> <li><code>"\u20AC"</code>, in every locale, on every OS.</li> </ul>