On 08/19/2011 01:24 PM, John H. Jenkins wrote:
In order to get the UTC and WG2 to agree to a major architectural change such as you're suggesting, you'd have to have some very solid evidence that it's needed—not an interesting idea, not potentially useful, but seriously *needed*. That's how surrogates and the astral planes came about—people came up with solid figures showing that 65,536 code points was not nearly enough. So far, the evidence suggests that we're in no danger of running out of code points.
And indeed, it went the other way too, back when ISO-10646 had not 17, but 65536 *planes* and someone provided some reasonable evidence (or just plain reasoned arguments) that 4.3 *billion* characters was probably overkill.
~mark
