I still find the surrogates different. Bidi, private use, ligatures, ... are script or locale related. Unicode uses numeric values from 0 to 1112063. You can i

I still find the surrogates different. Bidi, private use, ligatures, ... are script or locale related. Unicode uses numeric values from 0 to 1112063. You can invent all kinds of methods to encode numbers from 0 to 1112063 (variable length, fixed length, decimal, hexadecimal, anything else). But most ways I can think of to encode these numbers, including variable length ones that would use 8 bit or 16 bit primitives, don't require me to actually reserve some of those to-be-encoded numbers themselves for a special meaning. Yet for UTF-16 they managed to do it. Imagine that all other encodings out there would also want to reserve some Unicode values for their own purpose!