Re: holes (unassigned code points) in the code charts

From: Mark Davis ☕ <mark_at_macchiato.com>
Date: Fri, 4 Jan 2013 10:44:20 -0800

http://www.unicode.org/alloc/CurrentAllocaiton.html
=>
http://www.unicode.org/alloc/CurrentAllocation.html

Mark <https://plus.google.com/114199149796022210033>
*
*
*— Il meglio è l’inimico del bene —*
**

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 10:24 AM, Whistler, Ken <ken.whistler_at_sap.com> wrote:

> Stephan Stiller continued:
>
> > Occasionally the question is asked how many characters Unicode has. This
> > question has an answer in section D.1 of the Unicode Standard. I
> > suspect, however, that once in a while the motivation for asking this
> > question is to find out how much of Unicode has been "used up". As
> > filling in holes would be dispreferred, it might be interesting to know
> > how much of Unicode has been filled if one counts partially filled
> > blocks as full. I have no reason to disagree with the (stated and
> > reiterated) opinion that our codespace won't be used up in the
> > foreseeable future, but it's simply a fun question to ask.
> >
>
> The editors maintain some statistical information relevant to this fun
> question at:
>
> http://www.unicode.org/alloc/CurrentAllocaiton.html
>
> Feel free to reference those fun facts the next time Unicode comes up in
> conversation at the bar. ;-)
>
> There have been a few notable examples where particularly egregious
> examples of holes in blocks that seemed unlikely to be filled with like
> material in the future were "reprogrammed" as it were, and grabbed for the
> encoding of unrelated sets of characters. The most notable of these is the
> range U+FDD0..U+FDEF in the middle of the Arabic Presentation Forms-A
> block. There was a clear consensus in both committees that nobody wanted to
> add any more encodings for presentation forms of Arabic ligatures. So, when
> a need arose to add another range of noncharacters, the UTC simply decided
> that the otherwise unused range U+FDD0..U+FDEF could serve for that, while
> not requiring the addition of a new two-column block that could otherwise
> be used on the BMP. There are several symbol blocks on the BMP which have
> also had a somewhat colorful and creative history of "hole-filling" over
> time.
>
> --Ken
>
>
>
>
Received on Fri Jan 04 2013 - 12:45:50 CST

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