ASCII, Unicode and Livecode

[Richmond Mathewson]

So, there I am reading a BBC computer manual (as one does) where I am
informed that the ASCII set consists of 128 chars . . .

. . . that's funny, because I had 256 (i.e. 2 x 128) rumbling around in 
my mind.

As I have to develop a script that determines whether a char is a 
single-byte char or the first half of a double-byte char . . . ouch . . 
. this is probably fairly важно, to use a rather useful Bulgarian word . . .

Messing around in Livecode, I set up a stack with 2 fields; one 
containing a string of ASCII text:

"LAT" Еat my cheese

and the other containing a Unicode string:

"UNIK" 'a Sanskrit word' I won't try to represent here [anyway, a spot 
of juicy double-byted goodness]

then I set up a third field called "C1"

2 buttons; one to get the charToNum for the first char in fld "LAT", and 
one to do the
same for fld "UNIK"

they both contain this sort of script:

on mouseUp
put charToNum(char 1 of fld "LAT") into fld "C1"
end mouseUp

and that's all very jolly, except that

on mouseUp
put charToNum(char 1 of fld "UNIK") into fld "C1"
end mouseUp

returns "9" which is within the ASCII range, so there is no way I can 
use that sort of script to determine what I want to.