RE: Supporting full Unicode

[David Starner <dvdeug@email.ro>]

On Wed, 12 May 2004 16:34:34 +0200, Martin Krischik wrote:

> amado.alves wrote:
> 
>> 
>> You made me go for the book to see if this had changed. It has not. The
>> codespace is 24 bit. Actually it's 21.
>> 
>> "In the Unicode Standard, the codespace consists of the integers from 0 to
>> 10FFFF..."
>> 
>> (The Unicode Standard, Version 4.0.1, section 2.4)
> 
> If you mean the currently used code space then yes. But they extend the
> codepace from time to time

No, they don't. They extended it once, in the Unicode/ISO-10646 merge in
1996, as well as moving characters around. There is no plan to do either
ever again.

There's no reason to extend the code space, either. There's over a million
code points, and in a decade they've managed to fill about a hundred
thousand of them. The Unicode roadmaps <http://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/>
have space blocked out for every character they think they might want to
encode, from Rongorong to Egyptian Hieroglyphics. All of it fits in
three planes of 65,536 characters with plenty of room to spare on one of
them. It's though that Chinese character might exceed their current plane,
and need a new one. Even with two planes for Chinese, there's still only
four planes in use, plus two planes permanently dedicated to Private Use
characters, leaving 650,000+ characters with no conceivable use. Short of
extraterrestrials, there's no point in extending the code space.