Re: OT: TECH: Dumb Unicode question

Quoting John Cowan <cowan@...>:

> Mark J. Reed scripsit:
>
> > It seems that either 1,048,576/0x100000 (16 planes) or
> > 16,777,216/0x1000000 (256 planes) would have been more logical than
> > the chosen 1,114,112/0x110000 (17 planes), which doesn't fit into any
> > nice power of two.
> [snip]
> In the beginning, Unicode had one plane of 2^16 = 65536 codepoints (but
> didn't call it a "plane") and ISO 10646 had no less than 2^15 planes
> (32768 planes) for 2^31 or 2,147,483,648 codepoints.  By definition,
> Plane 0 of ISO 10646 was the same as Unicode.
While I recognize the impracticality of the post-Astral (Transcendental?
Heavenly? Nirvanal?) planes of ISO-10646, I somehow miss the idea that so
many characters were provided for. What if we make contact with an alien
race and need to encode all of their historical scripts alongside our own?
What if a future world government decides to design a one-to-one mapping
between citizens and glyphs? With 2^31 codepoints, they could do so for a
very long time before they ran out.

--
JS Bangs
jaspax@glossopoesis.org

"We're counting on our virtues
   Because it's too hard to count the dead."
     -Jason Webley

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