Not Unicode?

[Renegade]

Is there ever any compelling reason to not use Unicode?

Like, why would anyone ever use a local language encoding?

Perhaps on extremely small controller chips, like 8-bit or 4-bit procs, you may be pressed for space, but in the normal world of computing... any reasons?

[Ath]

Is there ever any compelling reason to not use Unicode?

1) When using a compiler/runtime lib that doesn't (natively) support unicode... (ex. Delphi / BCB < 2009)

[daddydave]

See also this thread. I had asked the same thing not long ago, as you probably know.

[Renegade]

I remember that thread. Slightly different question here, but close.

I suppose that if the tools you have don't support it... then... ummm... yeah, why not retool? (That's not really practical for a lot of people.)

It just seems like it's been so long that by now things should work properly.

[Ath]

A related question that popped up recently (but has been lingering around for a while), is if a Unicode-capable program, should also support rtl-languages like Chinese, Japanese, Arabic etc., now that these character-sets are supported?

Writing software that is available, and could be used, globally, I might have to educate myself in these features and languages, just to 'support' the roughly 1/3 part of the world that uses their language that way...