Why does the Java char primitive take up 2 bytes of memory?

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Is there any reason why Java char primitive data type is 2 bytes unlike C which is 1 byte?

Thanks

widechar utf-16 unicode java
8 Answers

Java uses UNICODE (Universal Code) representation which accepts all the language formats in the world.

     ASCII  American Standard Code for Information Exchange

     ISO 8859-1 for western European Countries

     KOI-8 for Russian

     GB10830 & BIG-5 for Chinese

In this 1 byte is reserved for ASCII & remaining 1 byte can accept any other language => 2byte for char

while C/C++ uses only ASCII Representation => 1 byte for char

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