Re: plane business

From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Fri Oct 05 2001 - 15:09:04 EDT


Markus Scherer asked:

> Asmus Freytag wrote:
> > Designation changed twice in Unicode, once to
> > designate the surrogates, and once to designate
> > the 32 characters on the BMP as non-characters.
>
> Designation also changed between Unicode 1.1 and 2.0 to move
> around the Private-Use and Hangul blocks, and to add the
> Plane-16/17 Private-Use areas. Right?

[[ BTW, those are Plane 15 and Plane 16 for private use, not 16/17.]]

I distributed the following abbreviated history around on
the UTC list, but it might prove useful to people on the
general list as well. When making distinctions to this
level of detail, "allocation" refers to the availability
of a code point to be used for something/anything in the standard;
"designation" refers to the specification of a particular
usage class for a group of code points; and "assignment"
refers to the association of a particular abstract character
to a particular code point.

There are at least *three* overlapping histories in question:

I. Allocation of code points.

 0000..FFFF allocated in Unicode 1.0
10000..10FFFF allocated in Unicode 2.0

II. Designation of code point usage.

A. Private use

  E800..FDFF designated in Unicode 1.0
  F900..FDFF un-designated in Unicode 1.1
  E000..E7FF designated in Unicode 1.1
 F0000..FFFFD designated in Unicode 2.0
100000..10FFFD designated in Unicode 2.0

B. Noncharacter

  FFFE..FFFF designated in Unicode 1.0
 1FFFE..1FFFF designated in Unicode 2.0
 ...
10FFFE..10FFFF designated in Unicode 2.0
  FDD0..FDEF designated in Unicode 3.1

C. Surrogate

  D800..DFFF designated in Unicode 2.0

III. Assignment of characters to code points.

For the history of the assignments and changes thereto,
see the various major and minor versions of Unicode, and
in particular Appendix D in Unicode 2.0 and Unicode 3.0.

--Ken



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