OT: unicode (Was: Re: Upcoming gfortran 15 will contain unsigned numbers)

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?