Re: Code pages and Unicode

From: Richard Wordingham <richard.wordingham_at_ntlworld.com>
Date: Wed, 24 Aug 2011 18:48:54 +0100

On Wed, 24 Aug 2011 08:02:42 -0700
"Doug Ewell" <doug_at_ewellic.org> wrote:

> But some people seem to be dead serious about the need to go beyond
> 1.1 million code points, and are making dead-serious arguments that
> we need to plan for it.

Those are two different claims. 'Never say never' is a useful maxim.
The extension of UCS-2, namely UTF-16, is far from optimal, but it
could have been a lot worse - at least the surrogates are contiguous.
All I ask is that we have a reasonable way of extending it if, say,
code points are squandered. I think, however, that <high><high><rare
BMP code><low> offers a legitimate extension mechanism that can
actually safely be ignored when scattering code assignments about the
17 planes (of which only 2 are full).

Perhaps it is just as well we will never need a CJK character for every
surname. It seems that we can safely accommodate CJK language tags.

Richard.
Received on Wed Aug 24 2011 - 12:53:27 CDT

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