ObjectIcon is UNICODE ICON

There are recent updates to code and wiki by Robert Parlett over at the google code ObjectIcon project including UNICODE in ICON.

ucs (standing for Unicode character string) is a new builtin type, whose behaviour closely mirrors that of the conventional Icon string. It operates by providing a wrapper around a conventional [...] Icon string, which must be in utf-8 format

For SVN, you might want to use
svn checkout http://objecticon.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ objecticon-read-only

The lack of UNICODE in UNICON has been a worry: now there is an ICON + OOP alternative. UNICODE arrived recently in swi-prolog and is now in the alpha of REBOL3.

Languages which parse strings but are not UNICODE by 2010 cannot be of much interest in their intended niche in China, India, Malaysia, Indonesia ...