Why UTF-8/16 character encodings?

[qznc]

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.

Once I heared an argument from developers working for banks. They 
coded business-specific stuff in Java. Business-specific meant 
financial concepts with german names (e.g. Vermögen,Bürgschaft), 
which sometimes include äöüß. Some of those concept had no good 
translation into english, because they are not used outside of 
Germany and the clients prefer the actual names anyways.