Unicode utf-8 doesn't do back-and-forth?

[Mike C. Fletcher]

Well, and here I was believing utf was a clean and elegant format to 
make the best of a bad situation (I'm hoping utf-8 still is, though, of 
course, it will have these dang surrogates to contend with ;) ).

"Nothing's clean, nothing's elegant kid.  Get used to that.  This is the 
real world, and out here, we just hack at the corpses until they give us 
what we want.  There're no master criminals any more, just frustrated 
people, impossible situations, and no emotional air conditioning."

Mike

Tim Peters wrote:
...
> The rest is history, and "surrogates" are a hack to get the effect of 4 more
> bits (way more than enough to last us forever 10 times over).  In
> pre-Unicode-speak, you'd call them "escape codes".
> 
> not-to-be-confused-with-escape-code-points-ly y'rs  - tim
...