Character size in Java vs. C

Question

Why does a character in Java take twice as much space to store as a character in C?

Answer 1

Because Java uses Unicode, C generally uses ASCII by default.

There are various flavours of Unicode encoding, but Java uses UTF-16, which uses either one or two 16-bit code units per character. ASCII always uses one byte per character.

• http://java.about.com/od/programmingconcepts/a/unicode.htm
• http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-16