Running out of code points, redux (was: Re: Feedback on the proposal...)

[David Starner via Unicode]

On Sun, Jun 4, 2017 at 9:13 PM Martin J. Dürst via Unicode <
unicode at unicode.org> wrote:

> Sorry to be late with this, but if 20.1 bits turn out to not be enough,
> what about 21 bits?
>
> That would still limit UTF-8 to four bytes, but would almost double the
> code space. Assuming (conservatively) that it will take about a century
> to fill up all 17 (well, actually 15, because two are private) planes,
> this would give us another century.
>
> Just one more crazy idea :-(.
>

It seems hard to estimate the value of that, without knowing why we ran out
of characters. A slow collection of a huge number of Chinese ideographs and
new Native American scripts, maybe. Access to a library with a trillion
works over billions of years from millions of species, probably not. Given
that we're in no risk of running out of characters right now, speculating
on this seems pointless.
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