At 10:51 PM 2/22/01, Joel Rees wrote:
> > So Plane 9, say, can be nothing but surrogates-of-surrogates, to some 64-
> > or 128-bit code space.
> >
>
>You do mean for UTF-16, don't you?
Let me be somewhat more explicit, now that I've thought about it for a
while. IIRC there is an entire private use plane. *Anyone* could develop a
scheme whereby multiple private use plane codepoints could represent single
characters, in the same general fashion that surrogates represent the
supplemental planes (if I have the current terminology right :-). The
mechanism to do this would also be private use, built on top of any
software that can deal with supplemental planes. Depending on how many
codepoints you used per "new character", you could encode up to a sh*tload
of characters (that's the SI unit for very large finite numbers). Because
it's private use, *it's still Unicode*. Of course, it would be nice to get
the people who would use it to agree on the details. And yes, the file
sizes would be enormous...in 1985 terms.
--
Curtis Clark http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/
Biological Sciences Department Voice: (909) 869-4062
California State Polytechnic University FAX: (909) 869-4078
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