Event if this idea catches on, there will be years before each and every source code editor properly supports it. For example, I work now on a Java code base w

Event if this idea catches on, there will be years before each and every source code editor properly supports it. For example, I work now on a Java code base which was originally developed on French keyboards, with accents and other diacritical marks typical of the French language in comments and sometimes in constant values. This code base, developed on Eclipse on Windows boxes which defaulted to CP-1252 encoding, was kept in CVS on Linux boxes, then migrated to Subversion on Linux boxes, and now is edited on Eclipse on Linux boxes which default to ISO-8859-1 encoding (when the developer has not fat-fingered the Eclipse configuration). None of the original diacritical marks has been preserved and the comments in particular are a mess. You can however choose to make an effort to interpret the meaning of the comment and to replace any funny looking sign with a similar-looking ASCII character. None of this would have happened if the editor had accepted only ASCII characters: it would have been simpler and because of that much more robust.