This is a great summary, thanks for that. I'd never had this explained in a way I could personally relate to. I remember being concerned about Han unification

This is a great summary, thanks for that. I'd never had this explained in a way I could personally relate to. I remember being concerned about Han unification around the time Ruby 1.9 was released, since this seemed to be one of Ruby's major reasons for being encoding-independent instead of standardizing on Unicode. But I hadn't heard about this issue in a while, except to hear occasionally someone say it's not a problem (maybe it was a Chinese person instead of a Japanese person -- the Wikipedia page says that the Chinese aren't as concerned about Han unification since Traditional Chinese didn't get unified with Simplified Chinese).