In a message dated 2002-01-02 5:05:23 Pacific Standard Time,
marco.cimarosti@essetre.it writes:
> There are worse things than thi: what if someone discovers a script with
> more than 1,114,111 characters? Back to the drawing board to redesign all
> the UTF's!
Not all of them. UTF-8 and UTF-32, at least, already have the architecture
to represent 2^31 and 2^32 code points, respectively. The definitions would
simply have to changed to make the additional code points legal.
Only UTF-16 would truly need to be redesigned, and that has already been
proposed. For example, Masahiko Maedera once proposed a "UTF-16x" in which
code points in the U+EExxx block were designated as "super surrogates."
Three of these "super surrogates," or six 16-bit words, would be combined to
represent code points beyond plane 17. (This was back in the days when some
people felt that a great and crippling schism existed between Unicode and ISO
10646 because the former disallowed such code points and the latter allowed
them.)
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Sat Jan 05 2002 - 13:36:50 EST