[oaiey]

Especially considering that English ASCII fits into 128 characters including punctuation ... I do not want to start thinking how Chinese or Japanese fits into that.

In reality the ask is maybe: let us use 25 characters english without uppercase? Which we have in Basic and dozens of old style programming language however typically upper case.

[Arnavion]

In a universe where Chinese or Japanese were the prominent languages for program identifiers, there wouldn't be a requirement to fit into 128 characters in the first place. The dominant charset would probably be GB2312 / Shift-JIS which are multi-byte.