zlacker

In this case, sure. But what if we shifted to rendering with emojis or whatnot. What would the first ASCII character of the string be?

>>e12e+(OP)
If you anticipate that need, you just store the gradient as an array of strings, and you still then only need a trivial lookup.

>>vidarh+s03
I was more commenting on the language design here; the idea of indexing into a UTF-8 string and returning an ASCII character. What does the index count? Bytes? There doesn't seem to be a way to get UTF-8 characters from strings?

Ed: There seems to be an UTF-8 library:

https://github.com/jordanhubbard/nanolang/tree/main/modules/...