Before Unicode, when a character was a byte was a character,
Perl knew only about the 128 characters defined by ASCII, code points 0
-through 127 (except for under S<C<use locale>>). That left the code
+through 127 (except for under L<S<C<use locale>>|perllocale>). That
+left the code
points 128 to 255 as unassigned, and available for whatever use a
program might want. The only semantics they have is their ordinal
numbers, and that they are members of none of the non-negative character