Its a better way of doing things - you can handle things in their native format rather than have to arbitrarily convert to UTF8 (which is an &#x27;encoding&#x27; itself).<p>[edit] I remember a talk where Matz was asked this specific question and tried to explain it clearly but seemed confused as to how the questioner could have such a poor grasp of unicode (the difference between monolingual americans and japanese i guess)