I saw that in many golfing programming languages with a SBCS other than UTF-8 there is a converter (encoding and decoding) that converts the code/file from the SBCS defined characters to UTF-8 and vice versa.
What is the point of having the UTF-8 representation of the code bytes? My only guess is to be able to save the code in 1-byte characters with known charset for golfing score evaluating purposes. However, if it for saving the program in UTF-8 encoding, isn't control characters like EOF can impact on reading back the file?
Plus, golfing-wise, does all challenges consider SBCS as valid byte-based scoring? or there are challenges that consider only UTF-8 as a 1 byte?
Thanks.