You're still wrong on UCS-2: Except for JavaScript were it's still used (afaik there are unportable workarounds, but it's still specified that way) all others use UTF-16. Yes, many methods operate on code units instead of code points (because the character type is usually 16 bits wide), but code-point-aware methods usually exist in Java, .NET and others. Just because a string is treated as a sequence of UTF-16 code units that doesn't make it UCS-2. You could with the same argument say that everything that uses UTF-8 and gives you access to the underlying bytes doesn't support Unicode at all, but only ASCII.