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From: Wolfgang Agnes <wagnes@example.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: OT: unicode (Was: Re: Upcoming gfortran 15 will contain unsigned numbers)
Date: Mon, 25 Nov 2024 08:35:48 -0300
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:

> On Sat, 23 Nov 2024 09:18:11 -0300, Wolfgang Agnes wrote:
>
>> How about UCS-2?
>
> “UCS-2” was the name of the encoding back when it was assumed that Unicode 
> was always going to be just 16 bits. After the coding was extended, those 
> “surrogate” ranges were introduced, to allow representation of the extra 
> characters within a 16-bit encoding, and so “UCS-2” was renamed to 
> “UTF-16”.
>
> In short, “UTF-16” is basically “UCS-2 with surrogates”.

Nice to know!  Thanks.  So, UCS means ``Universal Character Set''.  I
thought it was a whole different character set.  It's a bit difficult to
understand ``surrogates''.  So many definitions come up such as ``Basic
Multilingual Plane''.  Can you explain what surrogates are?