Comment by TZubiri

I thought this was going to go into an extended ascii, maybe 2 bytes per character, 2 bits for rgb, a highlight flag ( as opposed to coloring the words) and an unused bit in honour of ascii.

That way the colour can be defined at write time, languages don't need to implement them, they can be like whitespace and you can use color for whatever you want. Colour would be ignored by both compile and runtime of course... unless it wasn't