Releasing a language which only supports ascii is a travesty today. If what you really meant was that characters would be opaque streams of bytes, you should have said that - the fact that you didn't indicates that you don't really understand the issues involved. If that is why you didn't write any unicode support, you should have said that, too.
But you didn't just say you didn't have any support for it, or that you didn't understand the issues and needed to figure out what best to do. You were dismissive in the extreme of the entire idea - "I don't want to spend even a day on character sets" - and for someone who pretends to be working on a new language for web development this is such a monumental lack of judgment and information that it taints the entire language. The issue with HTML tables is similar, but to a lesser degree.
If this were some college kids half-baked homework Lisp implementation nobody would give a damn. But you've been preaching on Lisp forever, and you've been talking about Arc for years, and you've talked a lot about the next 100 year language. This is what we're supposed to look at for our revolution in computing? Even Visual Basic has high quality unicode support.
Making your HTML libraries dump stuff as tables is just silly, too. It's not egregious, like saying that unicode doesn't matter, but come on now. It's not 1978 anymore. There's an expectation that you have spectacularly failed to live up to.
Also, the fact that forum tells you to create an account after you've written your comment and submitted it? Extremely crappy.
Sorry to break it to you, but you have totally missed the point. Arc is not finished, it is still an experimental language. There will be unicode suppport, but there are many core issues yet to be resolved. You shouldn't use Arc for actual projects right now anyway, as Paul already warned that future changes not only can, but will break old code. So this is not the time to worry about Unicode. It's a bit like building a house and worrying about the curtains while you're still stacking bricks...
