I'm just curious, but how many people are actually interested in Unicode IO support in BlitzMax, other than siread?
I think everyone want to use BlitzMax as a 'pro' language (*). After multithreading (beta, but in developement) UNICODE is another great addition.
* = despite the original/planned idea of BRL/Mark I think BlitzMax can do other things than only 2d games...and BlitzMax has the potential.
PS: at this point I think we could think to 're-name' BlitzMax as Brucey-Max: with changes to BMK and many modules support we have a quite-complete (multi)platform developement language.