I seem to recall the designer of ascii stating that it was a mistake, and they should've gone with prefix coding instead (following-is-capital,a->A;following is number,<byte>->67 or something along those lines - basically escape codes for everything, I suppose). Instead we got ascii evolved to really, really, really big ascii (utf-32, and the variable encoding utf-8).
But yeah, having a "next-is-superscript"-token would probably be cleaner than individual code points for every little glyph that might be a superscript...
A number of early computer systems used teletypes for I/O, and had programming languages in which exponentiation was expressed by moving a half line up, and array subscripts by moving a half line down.