[vorg]

> but Unicode makes that argument even sillier

Unicode Standard (version 10.0, section 23.1 Control Codes) makes it clear that it "specifies semantics for the use" of only 9 of those ASCII control codes you mentioned, i.e. U+0009 to U+000D (HT, LF, VT, FF, CR) and U+001C to U+001F (RS, GS, RS, US). The rest of the 65 ASCII and Latin-1 control codes, except U+0085 (NEL), "constitute a higher-level protocol that is outside the scope of the Unicode Standard".

Particularly about NUL, it says: "U+0000 null may be used as a Unicode string terminator, as in the C language. Such usage is outside the scope of the Unicode Standard, which does not require any particular formal language representation of a string or any particular usage of null."

So Unicode makes that argument less silly.