This bug deserves to stay open with its high priority (for whatever good that does these last seven years, although I appreciate all the efforts put forth, and have been making heavy use of the workarounds in the patches), because when working with Unicode data in programs, even exception messages are not properly displayed... instead, they cause a secondary exception of not being able to display the data of the original exception to the console.

And writing Unicode data to the console as part of an interactive or command line program has to either be done with the hopes that the data only includes characters in the console, to avoid the failures, or with lots of special encoding calls and character substitutions for code points not in the console repertoire. Remember that the console is supposed to be human readable, not encoded numerically as ascii() would do. 

ascii() is sort of OK for for exception messages, but since that doesn't happen by default, the initial message to the console with Unicode data often doesn't appear, and an extra repetition after a failed message and a rework of the message parameters is required, which impedes productivity.