On Sun, Nov 04, 2001 at 06:05:15PM -0800, H. Peter Anvin wrote: > Unicode are *currently* committed to fitting within 20.1 bits -- but > they were equally committed to fitting within 16 bits :(
It didn't take long for them to realize that 16 bits was not enought; Unicode 2.0 was out in July of '96. But it took them almost 5 years (until March 2001) to actually need to go outside 16 bits. Note that with every forseen possible addition to Unicode, including Egyptian Hiroglyphics and the like, that there's still over 700 thousand free spaces for characters left in those 20.1 bits. > It's easy to chew up planes if you have to do something systematic... It can't be "idiosyncratic, personal, novel, rarely exchanged, or private-use", and it can't be a "[g]raphology unreleated to text". Within those restrictions, and the fact that they won't add hundreds of thousands of characters without very very good reason, what's going to be added to Unicode to take up 700 thousand characters? -- David Starner - [EMAIL PROTECTED] Pointless website: http://dvdeug.dhis.org "I saw a daemon stare into my face, and an angel touch my breast; each one softly calls my name . . . the daemon scares me less." - "Disciple", Stuart Davis -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
