I chose the most available non-ASCII character I could find. Set the criterion to be "present in most ISO 8-bit character sets" and there are really only two candidates, section sign and degrees sign. ...

Brilliant! We'll use degrees sign for function composition (so that it follows the convention in everything except a handful of obscure programming languages). That frees up dot for record.field. And still we can scratch our heads for something to do with section sign. SS as in set? Some smoother syntax for swifter, saner, salubrious setting. Super! AntC