It's not "political correctness" to be a civilized, international human being, and support every language. It's an appalling display of barbarism, ignorance, closed-mindedness, and bigotry to claim that ASCII is all you need.
Guido had to spend a year on Unicode because Unicode is hard. But he spent that year on it because Unicode is essential to any modern programming language. Py3K is a massive improvement over Python 2 largely because it gets Unicode right.
Java is a massive improvement over C++ in many ways, and one of those ways is that it's a pure Unicode environment (Unicode has since moved beyond UTF-16 to support 32-bit code points, and Java has evolved to deal with those).
Think about this Mark: The Lisp in McCarthy's 1960 paper didn't deal with character sets. Why was that? Because he was a barbarian? Or because he was at a stage where he was dealing with other issues?
Paul, I think a lot of the arc emo-kids would be assuaged if you would talk a little bit more about whether you outright reject the possibility of unicode in Arc versus whether or not you just hadn't gotten to it.
I mean, I think a lot of this would die down if you were to say something like "Look, I'm building a language, I haven't gotten to unicode. If someone builds a patch that works, I'd be happy to integrate it in". Or something like that.
I know it would make a difference to me, and would let a lot of people look past the fact that it's missing _right now_
As I read it, character set support isn't that interesting to him right now, and he'd rather focus on other things. Everyone keeps treating it like this version of the language is the final one. Of course it's going to constantly gain new functionality.
If that had been my impression I'd never have posted anything on this rather boring topic. What made me think it might be a permanent design decision is this extract from the Arc intro: "[...] it doesn't support any character sets except ascii. Such things may have their uses, but there's also a place for a language that skips them"
The problem is that it's left open to interpretation. Sure, he said Arc is a work in progress, and everyone gets that. The problem is knowing what's on the table for change, and what's not.
The Lisp in McCarthy's paper was a theoretical model for computation, not a language implementation made to build practical websites with.
I agree that you should get the other issues right first; they're more important in the long run. What annoys most people about the problem with character sets is that it means they can't go out and build the websites they want to using Arc yet.
It's because McCarthy, like most people of the time, was a barbarian by any modern standard, and at that time, the users of the language were almost without exception white, middle-class, non-"immigrant" (in the last 100 years or so) Americans. ASCII was good enough for them. Character sets weren't expanded to deal with the other 6 billion people on the planet until later.
There's no point in using a language that's going to exclude 95% of humanity.
