"UCS-2 (2-byte Universal Character Set) is a character encoding that was superseded by UTF-16 in version 2.0 of the Unicode standard in July 1996". Java adopted UCS-2 which was later supplemented with UTF-16 support.
There are at least a few languages in this world which do not use roman letters and are better represented as multibyte sequences :). That is why Java added support for supplementary UTF-16 characters over and above UCS-2. That said, use of UTF-8 would have been optimal for western languages, but sub optimal for several other languages.
There are at least a few languages in this world which do not use roman letters and are better represented as multibyte sequences :). That is why Java added support for supplementary UTF-16 characters over and above UCS-2. That said, use of UTF-8 would have been optimal for western languages, but sub optimal for several other languages.