Alternatively every flag that changes the semantics of the code is a workaround for either legacy code no one will fix or language committee decisions that have unintended side effects.
The state of affairs in C and C++ is abhorrently bad. Not only is there `char` but also `signed char` and `unsigned char`, and the standards seem to leave the signedness interpretation of bare `char` up to the implementation.
Ada explicitly settled on `Character` being an enumeration type based on a specific character set encoding. When I learned Ada 95, the ARM specified the ISO 8859-1 character set for `Character`, likewise with `Wide_Character` and `Wide_Wide_Character` explicitly settling on 16- and 32-bit implementations of UCS. I wish more language specifications made decisions like this.
D following suit with tying its `char`, `wchar`, and `dchar` to UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32 is commendable.
