I am raising the question: Should the future Lua 5.5 have unicode support? Since a lot (a lot a lot) encoding issues were solved with unicode and we are observing an international trend for the utf-8 use....
In my opinion: unicode is the future (actually, unicode is already the present for the past years), and ASCII was developed in 1960. Today, it is an old and very limitted character encoding.....
I would love to see LUA keep up to date.
Unicode includes many many codepoints whose only justification is either backwards compatibility (see e.g. Arabic presentation forms) or typesetting (non-breaking space, em-space, etc.) IOW it is a hack, unavoidably.
It would be nice to support identifiers in multiple languages, but that would only be a subset of Unicode anyway. And the typesetting codes would never be needed for a programming language. You could do it but only at a cost, and it makes more sense to put the burden on the programmer to normalize all space chars to one.
G
