Why UTF-8/16 character encodings?

[Hans W. Uhlig]

On Saturday, 25 May 2013 at 03:46:23 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 5/24/2013 7:16 PM, Manu wrote:
>> So when we define operators for u × v and a · b, or maybe n²? 
>> ;)
>
> Oh, how I want to do that. But I still think the world hasn't 
> completely caught up with Unicode yet.

Using those characters would be wonderful and while we do have 
unicode software support we don't really have unicode hardware 
support. I am still on my 102 key keyboard and I haven't really 
seen a good expanded character keyboard come along.