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You forgot `- 2^11` for the surrogate pairs. Gee, why isn't Unicode 2^21 code points? To understand the Unicode code point space you must understand UTF-16. The code space is defined by how UTF-16 works. That was my initial point.


If you're going to count the surrogate pairs as not-a-Unicode-codepoint, you should also count the other noncharacters: the last two codepoints on each of the 17 planes and the range U+FDD0-U+FDEF.

The expansion of Unicode beyond the BMP was designed to facilitate an upgrade compatibility path from UCS-2 systems, but it is extremely incorrect to somehow equate Unicode with UTF-16.


FWIW there is an official term for "code points excluding surrogates", it is "Unicode scalar value".


OK, I'm lost here. Why is there a 1:1 correspondence between the two?




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