On 6/4/2014 1:55 AM, Ian Kelly wrote:
On Jun 3, 2014 11:27 PM, "Steven D'Aprano" <st...@pearwood.info <mailto:st...@pearwood.info>> wrote: > For technical reasons which I don't fully understand, Unicode only > uses 21 of those 32 bits, giving a total of 1114112 available code > points. I think mainly it's to accommodate UTF-16. The surrogate pair scheme is sufficient to encode up to 16 supplementary planes, so if Unicode were allowed to grow any larger than that, UTF-16 would no longer be able to encode all codepoints.
I believe the original utf-8 used up to 6 bytes per char to encode 2**32 potential chars. Just 4 bytes limits to 2**21 and for whatever reason (easier decoding?), utf-8 was revised down (unusual ;-).
-- Terry Jan Reedy -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
