This makes it a PITA to use non-ASCII in string literals. They have applications beyond non-English language support. Unicode character escapes are opaque and i

This makes it a PITA to use non-ASCII in string literals. They have applications beyond non-English language support. Unicode character escapes are opaque and impair readability. If a wizened language like C can do it gracefully, newer languages should be able to as well. For languages limited to Latin-1 specifically, I always put a © in the header block as a canary for possible misinterpretation as Unicode or something else.