If we're going to change the format, why not just use the record separator, and field separator characters. They've been around since ascii.
Perl6 tried incorporating non-US-keyboard characters into the language and that went very badly. I'm sure it works fine for Perl6 people, but beyond that boundary, I still encounter people who can't type é on a Mac with the keyboard alone today, much less handle Alt-001E. So I am extremely pessimistic.