[/F]
last time I checked, there were no characters (even in the ISO standard) outside the 16-bit range. has that changed?
[MAL]
No, but people are already thinking about it and there is a defined range in the >16-bit area for private encodings (F0000..FFFFD and 100000..10FFFD).
Over the decades I've developed a rule of thumb that has never wound up stuck in my ass <wink>: If I engineer code that I expect to be in use for N years, I make damn sure that every internal limit is at least 10x larger than the largest I can conceive of a user making reasonable use of at the end of those N years. The invariable result is that the N years pass, and fewer than half of the users have bumped into the limit <0.5 wink>. At the risk of offending everyone, I'll suggest that, qualitatively speaking, Unicode is as Eurocentric as ASCII is Anglocentric. We've just replaced "256 characters?! We'll *never* run out of those!" with 64K. But when Asian languages consume them 7K at a pop, 64K isn't even in my 10x comfort range for some individual languages. In just a few months, Unicode 3 will already have used up > 56K of the 64K slots. As I understand it, UTF-16 "only" adds 1M new code points. That's in my 10x zone, for about a decade. predicting-we'll-live-to-regret-it-either-way-ly y'rs - tim