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It may sound silly, but I noticed my post count reached 499, so I wanted to do something special for my 500th post, so here it is.

A little reminiscing over my 100th post back on 2012-08-02

• Of course I'm still waiting for my card (or something) from my 100th. (@giles)
• I believe @iconfly still owes me a cake.
• @hansel, WOW, I did catch up!!
• Thanks to @pyhead for my (_)0 mug of milk, but I'm ready for another.
• Apparently I've lost ground on @giles, I was 80 posts behind him on my 100th & now I'm down 126...

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I now return you to your regularly scheduled program!

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I think I'll start splitting all of my answers on the forums into two posts, so that you can never catch up.

Like this ;-)

Surely you should use UTF-32 and present it one bit per post. And then a SHA-512 hash of it in the same fashion, of course, just in case it gets corrupted.

Yup, you totally beat me to :-)

@giles: Perhaps I should hack the forum so my post count (and only mine) gets incremented perrrrrrr keystroke.

@Cartroo: Now I just feel ganged up on. I thought we were friends...☺ Oh, yeah, and out of curiosity...that SHA-512 hash you mentioned....You didn't specify 2 or 3. That kind of ambiguity has been known to bring down rockets.

While I was looking for the link above I found this one* and just had to post it.

@hansel: I hope we're still friends!!

* Do not visit if you will be offended by the use of some strong language.

@a2j: Nothing to stop you doing the same thing with the hitherto uninvented UTF-64 - I mean, 4.3 billion code points can't be enough forever, right? And if anybody's using forum software as part of a rocket guidance system them I'm moving to a nuclear bunker statim...

That doesn't sound space efficient. I'll have to pre-invent UTF-8.5 which can be the UTF-8 equivalent of UTF-64...now I think we're on to something.

The funny thing is that of course my first impression was UTF-64, we'll never need that. But anyone who's been in IT long enough has seen claims about such things:

• 640K RAM
• 40,000,000 byte hard disk
• 8" Floppies
• 100MHz CPU core barrier
• IPv4

Thus we will likely end up deciding we need more code points. No matter how wacky it sounds.

For reference my main PC has:

• 16777216K RAM
• 2199023255552 byte hard disk
• No floppy
• 13200MHz (across 6 cores)
• IPv4 = ~ 4300000000 addresses
• IPv6 = ~340000000000000000000000000000000000000 addresses

Well, maybe... Although the driver for most CPU / memory / disk is people coming up with novel uses for technology, a rapidly moving field. The need for new code points is driven by alphabets, however, which progresses rather more slowly. I don't think we can rule out a need for more than the current 32-bit code points, but I'd be extremely surprised to see it in mine or my daughter's lifetime, especially given that the 32-bit space already has quite a lot of headroom.

The only reason they moved from 16-bit to 32-bit was that they started included dead alphabets and more special symbols - I believe the 16-bit space includes pretty much every single linguistic and domain language that's in active use today by anybody except archaeologists and historians. I think there are a few rarely used symbols in the logographic character sets which are also omitted (things like proper nouns). I'm hardly an expert, however!

You are making my point. People declare with certainty that something would have no need to expand in the future and pretty much every claim to such is blown away. I won't peculate as to why the 32-bit code points will be exhausted...I'm just saying that declaring they won't with certainty will more likely than not, make your statement false before you'd expect. Maybe even before your daughter has her own children...☺