Bill Baxter wrote:
I think that's the conclusion I'm coming too as well. While the use
of Unicode would have some advantages, there are various technical
issues with it (like I haven't been able to figure out how to get the
DOS console in Windows to display UTF-8). I think those issues can
all be solved, but it would be a large distraction for the D
community. Better to let some big, well-funded, massively popular
language pioneer in this area. If some language with a billion
programmers decided to use Unicode, then you can bet that most of
these infrastructure problems would start to disappear quickly as
annoyed programmers start scratching their own itches and as they
start complaining to the people who write the tools they use.
Realistically, if I complain to any software vendor now that their
editor doesn't work well with D because they don't have funky Unicode
functionality, the response is likely to be "Sounds like a problem
with D, whatever that is". If the language were Java or C++, though,
they would have little choice but to take the complaint seriously,
regardless of the effort required.
Unfortunately, you might be right in that D is not currently in a
position to force the issue.
