Why UTF-8/16 character encodings?

[Diggory]

On Tuesday, 28 May 2013 at 00:11:18 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 5/27/2013 4:28 PM, Hans W. Uhlig wrote:
>> On Monday, 27 May 2013 at 23:05:46 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>>> I've recently come to the opinion that that's a bad idea, and 
>>> D should not
>>> support it.
>>
>> Why do you think its a bad idea? It makes it such that code 
>> can be in various
>> languages? Just lack of keyboard support?
>
> Every time I've been to a programming shop in a foreign 
> country, the developers speak english at work and code in 
> english. Of course, that doesn't mean that everyone does, but 
> as far as I can tell the overwhelming bulk is done in english.
>
> Naturally, full Unicode needs to be in strings and comments, 
> but symbol names? I don't see the point nor the utilty of it. 
> Supporting such is just pointless complexity to the language.

The most convincing case for usefulness I've seen was in java 
where a class implemented a particular algorithm and so was named 
after it. This name had a particular accented character and so 
required unicode. Lots of algorithms are named after their 
inventors and lots of these names contain unicode characters so 
it's not that uncommon.