Unicode Explained

Version Issued Characters Blocks

3.2 2002-03 95,221 107

4.0 2003-04 96,447 122

4.1 2005-03 97,720 142

Version 5.0 is to be published in the third quarter of 2006. Information on it is available

at http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode5.0.0/. It is intended to add 1,365 charac-

ters, for the needs of some living languages (e.g., in India), for mathematics, and for

academic use, particularly for coding cuneiform and other ancient texts.

Coding Space

Coding space, or “codespace” to use the Unicode standard terminology, is the range

of integers that can be used as numbers for characters. In an 8-bit encoding, the coding

space is the range from 0 to 255. In Unicode, the coding space ranges from 0 to 10FFFF

in hexadecimal, 1,114,111 in decimal. Some numbers in the range correspond to char-

acters, some have been excluded from such usage, and some are currently unassigned.

A code point, also called code position, is simply a value in the coding space. It may or

may not have a character assigned to it.

The way Unicode uses the coding space is, strictly speaking, a technicality that does

not affect the identity or properties of any character. In that sense, the allocation is

independent of other design decisions. It is surely important to people who develop

the Unicode standard, since the amount of characters makes some logical planning and

allocation principles necessary. But does it interest others?