title: What is the point of the UTF-8 character literals proposed for C++17?
body: <p>What exactly is the point of these as proposed by <a href="https://isocpp.org/files/papers/n4267.html">N4267</a> ?</p>
  
  <p>Their only function seems to be to prevent extended ASCII characters or partial UTF-8 code points from being specified. They still store in a fixed-width 8-bit char (which, as I understand it, is the correct and best way to handle UTF-8 anyway for almost all use cases), so they don't support non-ASCII characters at all. What is going on?</p>
  
  <p>(Actually I'm not entirely sure I understand the need for UTF-8 string literals either. I guess it's the worry of compilers doing weird/ambiguous things with Unicode strings coupled with validation of the Unicode?)</p>