[MLton] Unicode / WideChar

[Henry Cejtin]

Wow: I must say I COMPLETELY disagree.  The notion of distinguishing between
a character and an encoding of the character seems to me to be incredibly
useful and desirable.  This seems even more obvious with unicode, where there
are multiple encodings (UTF-8, UTF-16, etc.).  The fact that there are
functions which convert between chars and some encoding, which you can think
of as casts, or you can think of as actual conversions, is no obstacle.
Of course if two different types are conflated, then code using this pun,
like
	res = 10*res + ch-'0';
becomes more terse, but I don't view that as any where near as enough of a
gain to offset the problems.