[WillAdams]

I still wish that the Unicode folks had set up a bunch of duplicate code points which could have been used exclusively for processing marked-up text and that the folks making markup systems/languages had followed through.

Say one was updating TeX to take advantage of this --- all the normal Unicode character points would then have catcodes set to make them appropriate to process as text (or a matching special character), while "processing-marked-up" characters would then be set up so that for example:

- \ (processing-marked-up variant) would work to begin TeX commands

- # (processing-marked-up variant) would work to enumerate macro command arguments

- & (processing-marked-up variant) would work to delineate table columns

&c.

and the matching "normal" characters when encountered would simply be set.