I haven't had a need for Unicode in Lua, but when I stumbled across some information about it, the essential story was that there is nothing stopping you from writing code to manipulate Unicode data (obviously), but there is also nothing built in to help you. All the built in string stuff is ANSI/ASCII/whatever.
Yes! I know the guy who started Lambda Lounge (Alex Miller http://tech.puredanger.com/about ) and heartily supported its founding; I spoke at it every once in a while; and my firm (Oasis Digital http://oasisdigital.com/ ) sponsors Lambda Lounge by paying for travel expenses for out-of-town speakers.
Lambda Lounge is the best software dev user group ever.
I haven't had a need for Unicode in Lua, but when I stumbled across some information about it, the essential story was that there is nothing stopping you from writing code to manipulate Unicode data (obviously), but there is also nothing built in to help you. All the built in string stuff is ANSI/ASCII/whatever.
However, the language Io (which often gets mentioned in the same breath as Lua, though it's quite different in some ways) has a stronger Unicode story: http://www.iolanguage.com/scm/io/docs/IoGuide.html#Unicode