UTF-8 support not on the road map?

[Tim Hubberstey]

On 2007-12-28 12:38, Thorsten Haude wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> * Jörg Fischer wrote (2007-09-04 11:04):
>> Zhang Weiwu wrote:
>>> Is there any plan for the future version of nedit? If so is UTF-8 support 
>>> on the way? Just curious.
>> The short answer to this is there is no roadmap ;-)
> 
> http://nedit.hackvalue.nl/niki/index.php/RoadMap

At the risk of incurring the wrath of the list, I have to question the 
importance of UTF-8 to a _programmer's_ editor. I'm not stating that it 
isn't important, I'm just throwing this out as a discussion point to see 
what the community thinks.

So that you can see where I'm coming from, this is my profile:
o English speaker
o Primarily hardware languages (VHDL, Verilog, SystemC) plus C and shell 
scripts
o Experience almost totally limited to tools produced in 
English-speaking countries

I have no doubt that UTF-8 support should be ranked very high for a word 
processor. However, most languages that I'm aware of support only 7-bit 
ASCII for the "active" (non-comment) portion of the language. This 
limits UTF-8 to, at most, the comments. I'm sure it is desirable to be 
able to write comments in UTF-8 but, again, I'm not aware of any full 
toolsets (compilers+simulators+debuggers+source code control+...) that 
will support this even if it is allowed by the language. In my 
experience, the language features supported by an entire toolset are 
often distressingly smaller than the language definition itself.


So... Is UTF-8 support actually important for a programmer's editor or 
is it a "nice to have" feature that can be moved further down the 
priorities list?

Tim