Naming files exclusion of certain characters

[demonikal]

I was just wondering if anyone knew the reason that certain characters, like a colon ( : ) for example, cannot be used in the naming of files, like Word documents and .txt documents

Is there a way to fix this?

Does it have something to with Unicode? I don't even know what Unicode is, but I've seen the term before

 

[beers]

A lot of them tie back into shell commands so the interpreter would spaz out when trying to do operations on a file with those characters.