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From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@geek-central.gen.new_zealand>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.programmer
Subject: Re: Why No Supplemental Characters In Character Literals?
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Date: Sat, 05 Feb 2011 11:26:53 +1300
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In message <iigcva$90q$1@news.eternal-september.org>, Mike Schilling wrote:

> Yes, it does (contain 16 bits.)

Yeah, I didn’t realize it was spelled out that way in the original language 
spec. What a short-sighted decision.

> It was defined to do so before there were supplemental characters ...

Why was there a need to define the size of a character at all? Even in the 
early days of the unification of Unicode and ISO-10646, there was already 
provision for UCS-4. Did they really think that could safely be ignored?