Why UTF-8/16 character encodings?

[Olivier Pisano]

On Tuesday, 28 May 2013 at 00:11:18 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>
> 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.

Would you have been to such an event if you could not have 
understood what people were doing or saying? Of course, when we 
are working on something with international scope, we tend to do 
it in english, but it doesn't mean every programming task is 
performed in english…

Being a non-native english speaker, I tend to see Unicode 
identifiers as an improvement over other programming languages. 
It's like operator overloading, it is good when used moderately, 
depending on the context of the programming task and its intended 
audience. BTW, I use a Unicode-aware alternative keyboard layout, 
so I can type greek letters or math symbols directly. ASCII-only 
identifiers sounds like an arbitrary limitation for me.