A solution could be essentially, a “beautifier” option. The beautifier/formatter would replace unicode with equivalents (such as lvar"rho" suggestion above), but perhaps integrated into main julialang. Additionally, the REPL should have a mode which automatically replaces unicodes with such equivalents also. In this way, pasting into REPL with this REPL option activated will result in non-unicode characters.
Perhaps a more elaborate solution is possible.