"Unicode characters are 32 bits long!"
Unicode characters are often visualized in a 32-bit code space for convenience, but the actual range of characters is somewhat smaller -- as mentioned above, the total number of code points is the huge, unintuitive number 0x10ffff. Most of this range is empty and likely to remain so forever. Even within the range that is normally used (the 65,536 code points of Plane Zero), there are still gaps and unspecified regions.
"What does Unicode do about the fact that Arabic is written RIGHT TO LEFT??"
Unicode is concerned with characters, not with drawing them on your screen in a particular direction. Drawing Arabic right-to-left is an issue for the software that is rendering the characters, not for Unicode.
"Unicode characters are 32 bits long!"
Unicode characters are often visualized in a 32-bit code space for convenience, but the actual range of characters is somewhat smaller -- as mentioned above, the total number of code points is the huge, unintuitive number 0x10ffff. Most of this range is empty and likely to remain so forever. Even within the range that is normally used (the 65,536 code points of Plane Zero), there are still gaps and unspecified regions.
"What does Unicode do about the fact that Arabic is written RIGHT TO LEFT??"
Unicode is concerned with characters, not with drawing them on your screen in a particular direction. Drawing Arabic right-to-left is an issue for the software that is rendering the characters, not for Unicode.
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