Why UTF-8/16 character encodings?

[Manu]

On 31 May 2013 05:07, Walter Bright <newshound2 at digitalmars.com> wrote:

> On 5/30/2013 4:24 AM, Manu wrote:
>
>> We don't all know English. Plenty of people don't.
>> I've worked a lot with Sony and Nintendo code/libraries, for instance, it
>> almost
>> always looks like this:
>>
>> {
>>    // E: I like cake.
>>    // J: ケーキが好きです。
>>    player.eatCake();
>> }
>>
>> Clearly someone doesn't speak English in these massive codebases that
>> power an
>> industry worth 10s of billions.
>>
>
> Sure, but the code itself is written using ASCII!
>

But that doesn't make it English, or any more readable...
The only benefit to forcing users to use ASCII is that everyone can
physically type it.
But that comes with disadvantages:
 1. It's not natural to type a word that you don't know what it is or how
to spell, you'll end up copy-pasting anyway rather than trying to
remember/copy it letter by letter and risk misspelling.
 2. It's less natural for the people who CAN read it, because they have to
mentally transliterate too. (And if they're kids/amateurs who don't know
even know the latin alphabet?)

Ie, it serves neither party to force someone who doesn't speak English to
write ASCII.
Add that to the points I (and others) made earlier about education, or
children learning to code. There's no compelling reason to force
identifiers in ASCII.
Currently, D offers a unique advantage; leave it that way.
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