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It's historical. When it was implemented 4 byte unicode did not exist.

Now that it does they can not change the names anymore.

It's the same as why windows is stuck with utf-16, because when they implemented it unicode was 2 bytes.



> When it was implemented 4 byte unicode did not exist.

Incorrect. When UTF-8 was invented, it was actually variable up to 6 bytes in length, being capable of representing code points up to U+7FFFFFFF. It was only shortened to 4 bytes in 2003. There is no point in history where UTF-8 was only limited to 3 bytes.


That doesn't seem right.

The 1998 version of MySQL didn't support unicode at all yet.

Unicode 2.0 introduced UTF-16 in 1996, making the need for non-BMP characters very explicit.

And UTF-8 at the time supported 31-bit code points.




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