> > Are we talking about different things?
> Yes, probably. I don't see how you can claim the things you claim, because it's pretty obvious that if you insert "foo", u8"foo", and L"foo" into the same stream, you can't avoid transcoding at least two of these three times.

I agree, you must transcode at least 2 of them, what I'm arguing is that you don't need a third intermediate encoding to do so. Only the input and output are relevant.