Why UTF-8/16 character encodings?

[Walter Bright]

On 5/30/2013 5:00 PM, Peter Williams wrote:
> On 31/05/13 05:07, Walter Bright 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!
>
> Because they had no choice.

Not true, D supports Unicode identifiers.