[Info-vax] Does OpenVMS Use Unicode?

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2016-06-13 03:58, lawrencedo99 at gmail.com wrote:
> Funny story about Unicode: initially it was going to be a 16-bit code, sufficient to cover all the world’s *current* writing systems. Then I guess its architects got ambitious, and decided to add in all the *historical* writing systems as well. So nowadays it is officially a 20-bit code. But who knows how much more it might grow in future?

No, it's not officially a 20 bit character coding.
It's range is actually 0x0 to 0x10FFFF. It's rather weird, but it's 
fixed, and I don't think it will be extended from that.
But there are plenty of free space left, so they can continue to make 
life miserable for many years to come even with the current definition.

Fun story #2: The Unicode book have Hieroglyphs on the face of it, but 
it wasn't until Unicode V5.2 in 2009 that you finally had Unicode 
encoding of Egyptian Hieroglyphs. So for a long time, the book about 
Unicode, which aimed at encoding all type of writing, used a text on the 
front page that was not possible to encode in Unicode.

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
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