sam and wiley are the products of plan 9 (and its antecedents)

plan9 is wide char/unicode/utf-<x> across-the-board. "it just works"
for multi-char, multibyte char, I8N because it was designed to do
it from day #1.

so, the references to compose key etc are about how the religious
wars of interface design came down on chorded input/commands and
not about if it is one UNICODE char in ASCII. 

-G