"I think perhaps people were just expecting 'new web-app language' to entail Unicode support." -- I would go further: I would say that many of us consider Unicode support an essential; it's part of getting the foundations right. PG mentioned hearing/reading Guido talk about the pain of switching Python's character support--but what was painful was the switching, not the character sets. The sooner Arc makes that switch, the less pain it'll be.
