> The reason for this lack of handling of Unicode linguistically is simply to make the lexer smaller and faster.

No, it is actually for security reasons. Once you allow non-ASCII identifiers, identifiers will become non identifiable. Only zig recognized that. Nim allows insecure identifiers. https://github.com/rurban/libu8ident/blob/master/doc/c11.md#...

Reading is fundamental. I was referring to the Nim lexer. Obviously the reason that it "allows insecure identifiers" is not "actually for security reasons". It is, as I stated, for reasons of performance ... I know this from reading the code and the author's statements.