^X (was: an odd question

The CDC Cyber series had many different character sets, which was a major pain in the ass for anyone maintaining software for them. I spent several years working on the Pascal compiler for the CDC machines (the orignal implementation from ETH). The initial character sets had 63 characters with 0 reserved for end of line. Later they moved to 64 characters, with zero being :. The made the end of line (remember this was the days of punched cards and line printers) marker very complicated. It was two or more zero characters that appeared at the end of a word (60 bit words, 10 characters per word). End of line testing was a real pain. Later they switched to a mixed 6 bit / 12 bit character scheme that made life even more complex. Determining the length of a string (in characters) involved interpreting each character in the string, you couldn't simply look at the amount of memory used. I spent many pleasant (and not so pleasant at times) years doing systems programming on those machines. The real scary thing is I still remember details of it, even after 25 years.