> To be pedantic, the backwards compatibility is because of the utf-8> encoding, not because of Unicode. And that was on purpose, not by> miracle :)
The first 128 Unicode Code Points (That 32bit unsigned numbers that map to known characters) / 7bit mask were also made to be ASCII compatible.. Not just the UTF-8 Encoding pattern.
> A full unicode character database takes multiple megabytes[1]. That is
> dozens of times larger than the whole Lua interpreter is right now.
Thats right. And I agree with you... We would not need the full unicode data. Initially, the unicode white spaces should be compatible, because whitespace is part of the Lua language, but they are represented slighty differently in unicode.