Supplementary characters in the Java(TM) platform

[Norbert Lindenberg]

I know a number of you are curious about how the Java platform will 
support the supplementary characters of the Unicode standard. The JSR 
204 expert group, consisting of experts of ten companies, has today 
published the Public Review Draft of its specification at:
    http://jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/review/jsr204/index.html

Highlights:
- Low-level APIs use the primitive type int to represent Unicode code 
points.
- Higher-level APIs rely on char sequences, such as String and char[], 
which are interpreted as UTF-16 sequences.
- There are methods to easily convert between various char and code 
point based representations.
- Supplementary characters are allowed in Java programming language 
identifiers.

Almost all of the specified functionality is implemented in the beta 
release of J2SE 1.5, which is available at:
    http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/index.jsp

If you have comments, please send them to the official feedback address:
    [EMAIL PROTECTED]
You can hear more about the supplementary character support in the J2SE 
platform in session B6 of the upcoming Unicode conference:
    http://www.unicode.org/iuc/iuc25/a338.html

Sorry if you see this message twice - my posting yesterday made it into 
the digest, but not to all subscribers or into the archive.

Best regards,
Norbert