Again and again and again, a byte is not meant to hold a text character. Also, as the sibling parent has pointed out, fixed width encoding only gets you so far because it doesn't help with grapheme clusters. That's probably why the world has basically settled with UTF8: it saves memory and destroys any notion that every abstract text character can somehow be represented by a single number.
> mandatory computer literacy
I don't understand why you keep bringing up this phrase and ignore a huge part of real world computing. College students should simply learn how Unicode works. Are you seriously demanding that CPU designers should change their chip design instead?
> mandatory computer literacy
I don't understand why you keep bringing up this phrase and ignore a huge part of real world computing. College students should simply learn how Unicode works. Are you seriously demanding that CPU designers should change their chip design instead?