On 22 August 2011 12:51, Shriramana Sharma <[email protected]> wrote: > On 08/22/2011 03:05 PM, Andrew West wrote: >> >> Can anyone think of a way to extend UTF-16 without adding new >> surrogates or inventing a new general category? > > Why would anyone *need* to do so? UTF-16 can represent all codepoints upto > Plane 16 right?
To clarify, I was replying to Richard Wordingham's tongue in cheek suggestion to extend UTF-16 to go beyond Plane 16 in the year 2790 or when only one free plane remains. I am not advocating extending UTF-16 or the Unicode code space, or suggesting that it will ever be necessary to do so. But hypothetically, I don't see a way to extend UTF-16 without breaking the stability policy. The same stability policies would also prohibit the assignment of any area of the Unicode code space for code page usage as Srivas Sinnathurai has proposed. (If there was an automatic filter on ideas that break one or more stability policies this mailing list would be a far quieter place.) Andrew
