If I was to post to this thread I’d be restating what I wrote 50 posts ago so I’ll just post a link: SE-0243: Codepoint and Character Literals - #252 by johnno1962
TLDR; a few well chosen operators added to stdlib can solve the problem without trying to tie down a new literal syntax. One opinion that has changed is that I’m leaning toward @michelf’s suggestion that single quotes be reserved for ASCII only literals to allow compile time validation and put an end to any Unicode Shenanigans.