>>20
You know why? They've ran out of ./()%-=,;!"<@#~)':`[]+*&|>{}\ and they need to add more functionality, and Unicode can help with that. Think about the Hearts operation, the vertical ellipsis hack, the line drawing indentation or the Euro formatting! We could even make it so that functions to convert between international character sets are implemented by using country currencies, so if you want to convert between US-ASCII and Shift_JIS the function is a dollar and a yen symbols. The data would actually go between the symbols, like €stuff$, because it's cooler, and the conversion is done in place, but $_ is binded to the results and we then create a dollar middledot special variable to retrieve the number of changes. How about it?