Swift

[Joe Becker]

A bit of ancient history, from the System Development Division spinoff 
of Xerox PARC:

     Around 1979, Xerox adopted the multi-byte Xerox Character Code 
Standard (XCCS), an ancestor of Unicode.

     Around 1980, Larry Masinter and I converted the Xerox Lisp system 
to XCCS, including our phonetic-based Japanese input method, using 
Japanese fonts supplied by Fuji Xerox.  The system was demo'ed at a 
trade show as "JLisp" ... of course the attendees showed no interest.

     Around 1985, Lori Nagata converted our product compiler (for a 
Pascal derivative called Mesa) to accept XCCS sourcecode, including 
fully multilingual identifiers, strings, and comments ... of course the 
Development Environment group showed no interest.

Maybe now the world is ready for "你好世界" ... I don't think I am ...

Joe