From: Jill Ramonsky (Jill.Ramonsky@aculab.com)
Date: Thu Oct 16 2003 - 05:14:25 CST
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Doug Ewell [mailto:dewell@adelphia.net]
> Sent: Thursday, October 16, 2003 8:19 AM
> To: Philippe Verdy; Nelson H. F. Beebe
> Cc: unicode@unicode.org
> Subject: Re: Java char and Unicode 3.0+ (was:Canonical equivalence in
> rendering: mandatory or recommended?)
>
>
> > planes with 31-bit codepoints, and maybe there will be an agreement
> > sometime in the future between ISO and Unicode to define new
> > codepoints out of the current standard 17 first planes
>
> Don't even begin to count on this. U+10FFFF will most
> assuredly be the
> upper limit as long as you and I are here to talk about it.
As a scientist, I don't believe in clairvoyance. I do, however, think
that "maybe ... sometime in the future ..." is a reasonable enough
statement to make, and that "...will most assuredly ...as long as you
and I are here" is a very dangerous predicition to make (unless I'm
wrong about clairvoyance).
Don't count on anything. Even if Unicode stops at 10FFFF, there may be
other, future standards, of which Unicode is but a subset. I'm sure the
designers of ASCII thought it was amply large enough at the time.
It's a simple enough rule - never hard-code limitations into your design
if you don't have to. You may one day live to regret it. (Or you may not
... but no-one will ever critise you for erring on the side of safety).
Jill Ramonsky
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