Yes! Plain ASCII is great, even when you need to properly handle non-ASCII. When >90% of your strings are ASCII in practice, then having an "is ASCII" bit in yo

Yes! Plain ASCII is great, even when you need to properly handle non-ASCII. When >90% of your strings are ASCII in practice, then having an "is ASCII" bit in your string headers can save a ton of memory, and gain more performance than you lose in flag checks and extra code. Heck, if your usual encoding is UTF-8, the flag bit can be purely advisory and ignored when it doesn't matter.