[anon_342njlkesr]

Re unicode:

When writing latex, you don't want to encounter unicode greek sigma. You want \sigma, as 6 7bit-ascii chars. Same in julia; sure, define a display mode that translates certain things into unicode for people like you, but keep compatibility with code-editors/people/tools who do not understand unicode. In short: I want to it to be possible to use a dumb text-editor, not an IDE/word-processor. (ok, the text editor will need to understand UTF8, because unicode string literals are really important; but please never go beyond a small white-listed subset of 7bit-ascii for language tokens).

[jernfrost]

LuaTex which is displacing Latex is doing just that, increasingly using unicode directly. I’ve never used a plain editor on my Mac which DIDN’T handle unicode. In fact I use a plain text editor to write julia code whith unicode symbols. Anyway it is a tiny portion of the code and the Julia public API never force you to use unocode. You can always chose a non-unicode variant of the API.

Not using UTF8 in this day and age is just begging for problems.

At least on my mac you got OS wide tools for working with unicode.

[ChrisRackauckas]

The convention in Julia is to not have unicode in user-facing APIs. That way you're not forcing unicode on anyone. All of the big libraries and the Base module do this. So you can use unicode for your variables to match your paper if you want, but no library (that I know of) is going to force you to have unicode support in your terminal.