I don't see how lacking it makes the language any more artistic.
Edit: and characterizing people as pedants for wanting a useful feature is silly and unproductive.
Guess what? You don't get the right to complain. Nobody does. Nobody has paid a support contract for anyone to include Unicode support on the language.
The guy wrote a language for himself. Not for you, not for me. And he does not want to work on Unicode support. I bet he doesn't want to work on database abstraction. Or Ajax widgets. Or whatever.
If those are so important to you, go somewhere else. But please, stop complaining.
EDIT: bad wording. As bct put it, complain all you want, but don't feel in the right to demand anything.
Yes we do. What we don't get is the right to demand.
Also, I don't think that PG wrote Arc just for himself. I think he wrote the language that he himself wanted, but that's not the same thing. If Arc was only for him, then why release it to the world? I think what he wants is the best of both worlds -- lots of users, with no support burden. Eventually, the users won't stand for this, but while Arc is still an infant, it makes a lot of sense.
To get people to stop pestering him?
How do these requests support the goals of Arc? I think it's funny that people have started complaining about these things (which aren't core to a language) instead of thinking about what kind of cool stuff they can build.
Why does a language that furthers the notion of software as art have to conform to existing conventions?
In fact, I can see one great use for Arc already: a more "hip and modern" language than Scheme that you can convince students to demand they be taught (instead of Blub.) I could envision a version of the SICP written for it by, say, _why.