2015-05-30 1:03 GMT+05:30 Adam <adam.mlmb@gmail.com>:
Symbols should under ordinary conditions not contain chars >= 128 as standard software practice is to implement all identifiers in English, or englishify them at the level of alphabet use e.g. 'uber ;

If anybody with a non-English-alphabet wants to use Gambti for instance for conveniency in educational purposes, then they can reconfigure themselves.


The amount of systems that are not UTF8-compliant is unlimited, and you never know when data copied/pasted etc. would pass through that,

(Wait, it's not UTF8 compliancy that's the question here, but whether the protocol/tool/etc. does that and also is UTF8 by default.)
 
so keeping the default setting as sparse as possible makes enormous sense. For instance;
 * Protocols: the SMTP and HTTP protcol is not UTF-8 by default, at least with not-too-unrecent browsers. I guess the same applies with,
 * Filesystems (FAT),
 * Various text editors I guess - at least VIM last I checked - and
 * Various other tools.
 * Fonts: You don't even know what characters beyond 0..127 that fonts implement, and absence of chars in the 128..256 range happens.


After having pondered extending the default even just from 127 to 255 by looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-1#Codepage_layout , I think an extension would be a bad idea because of the above reasons.


The one who wants more than that for text output can just use the non-escaping output routines e.g. print and display, that is really part of minimum knowledge.