> How many "big piles of mostly-ascii data" are there though? Well, the use case mentioned in the article is a pretty good one: program source code. Even if yo

> How many "big piles of mostly-ascii data" are there though? Well, the use case mentioned in the article is a pretty good one: program source code. Even if you're going to be writing in a foreign language, all of the fancy punctuation and whitespace that does useful stuff in the language ends up being ASCII, and a good hunk of the standard library is likely to have ASCII names for types and functions, etc.