srivas sinnathurai <sisrivas at blueyonder dot co dot uk> wrote: > PUA is not structured
It's not supposed to be. It's a private-use area. You use it the way you see fit. > and not officially programmable to accommodate > numerous code pages. None of Unicode is designed around code-page switching. It's a flat code space. This is true even for ISO 10646, which nominally divides the space into groups and planes and rows. As a programmer, I don't understand what "not officially programmable" means here. I've written lots of programs that use and understand the PUA. > Take the ISO 8859-1, 2, 3, and so on ..... > These are now allocating the same code points to many languages and > for other purposes. Character encodings don't allocate code points to languages. They allocate code points to characters, which are used to write text in languages. This is not a trivial distinction; it is crucial to understanding how character encodings work. > Similarly, a structured and official allocations to any many > requirements can be done using the same codes, say 16,000 of them. If you want to use ISO 2022, just use ISO 2022. I guess what I'm missing is why the code-page switching model is considered superior, in any way, to the flat code space of Unicode/10646. -- Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA | RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14 www.ewellic.org | www.facebook.com/doug.ewell | @DougEwell