There will be situations where you need to check specifically for 7-bit ASCII printable characters only. I've worked with APIs that require everything outside that range to be escaped/encoded into it.

Email could be an example, I guess, although I haven't worked with it enough to know whether the whole "7-bits only" thing is still an issue these days.

I think that was his point, that he had a good use for :print: over just -~