> But don't forget to use Mantis, you certainly experienced one of these
> http://bugs.squeak.org/view.php?id=3574

Indeed, this is the one I found. The other one (cut-n-paste does not
work) apparently hasn't been reported.

> And Smalltalk is a framework in which we can do this well and easily.
> Try to program such a shift in C++ for example...

Well, the Win32 API (pure C) handles Unicode just fine for more than 10
years, now. Many applications have been ported during that time,
although you still find applications that break when confronted with
characters outside the current locale.

Many C++ APIs have been moved to Unicode also, e.g. the Mozilla XPCOM
infrastructure started out in single-byte mode, but is now Unicode
throughout.

This is a case where static typing helps: if you change the APIs (which
is essentially what has been done in both cases), you will get a
compiler error (so people have to change a lot of code), but once
you are through with these changes, there will be fewer surprises at
run-time.

Regards,
Martin