Which programming languages were designed with Uni

Question

Which widely used programming languages were designed ground-up with Unicode support?

A lot of programming languages have added Unicode support as an afterthought in later versions, but which widely used languages were released with Unicode support from day one?

Answer 1

Google's Go programming language supports Unicode and works with UTF-8.

Answer 2

java and .net languages

Answer 3

Java uses characters from the Unicode character set.

Answer 4

Basically all of the .NET languages are Unicode languages, such as C# and VB.NET.

Answer 5

I don't know how far this goes in other languages, but a fun thing about C# is that not only is the runtime (the string class etc) unicode aware - but unicode is fully supported in source:

using משליט = System.Object;
using תוצאה = System.Int32;
public class שלום : משליט  {
    public תוצאה בית() {
        int אלף = 0;
        for (int λ = 0; λ < 20; λ++) אלף+=λ;
        return אלף;
    }
}

Answer 6

Java and the .NET languages, as other commenters have pointed out, although Java's strings are UTF-16 rather than UCS or UTF-8. (At the time, it seemed like a sensible idea! Now clearly either UTF-8 or UCS would be better.) And Python 3 is really a different, incompatible language from Python 1.x and 2.x, so it qualifies too.

The Plan9 languages around 1992 were probably the first to do this: their dialect of C, rc, Alef, mk, ACID, and so on, were all Unicode-enabled. They took the very simple approach that anything that wasn't ASCII was an identifier character. See their paper from 1993 on the subject. (This is the project where UTF-8 was invented, which meant they could do this in a pretty compatible way, in particular without plumbing binary-versus-text through all their programs.)

Other languages that support non-ASCII identifiers include current PHP.