this post was submitted on 15 May 2025
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Ascii needs seven bits, but is almost always encoded as bytes, so every ascii letter has a throwaway bit.
Let's store the boolean there then!!
That boolean can indicate if it's a fancy character, that way all ASCII characters are themselves but if the boolean is set it's something else. We could take the other symbol from a page of codes to fit the users language.
Or we could let true mean that the character is larger, allowing us to transform all of unicode to a format consisting of 8 bits parts.
Some old software does use 8-Bit ASCII for special/locale specific characters. Also there is this Unicode hack where the last bit is used to determine if the byte is part of a multi-byte sequence.