If Lil would at least just sling bytes around without mangling them, then I could embed lil.js as a more approachable data-exploration language in a work website, or use lilt for a foreign language TUI flashcard program. As it is even `write["out" "тест"]` will write ???? to the file, and `"тест"[0] = "?"` is 1. This feels like an active limitation, that lil is taking extra steps to implement, which limits its use a lot for me when I find it very interesting as a Q-like language.
In Decker, it could be a requirement that *displaying* strings clamps them to the bitmap's range, which mangles unicode only on display - which gives the programmer a chance to map intended ranges of non-ASCII characters to a displayable range.