On a practical matter, it seems like a bad idea to have codepoints that can take up to an arbitrary number of bytes - this just screams buffer overflow problems.
So in practicality, you’re going to want an arbitrary limit on this (the article suggests as much). But if you place a limit on it then you’ve got one implementation of the standard that can decode certain characters and another that can’t. Better to have one standard that puts a hard limit on the number of bytes and another standard that uses more bytes and so on.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think all kinds of UTF, including 16 and 32, support arbitrary length for a single effective character.
This would be because you can stack modifications as long as you like.
The first comment was kind of iffy when it was also talking about buffers and characters, and focusing on code points is mostly a bad focus. It's worth bringing up so nobody thinks fixed width at a single layer is particularly useful, because other layers will still be variable.
2shortplanks · · focus · HN ↗
So in practicality, you’re going to want an arbitrary limit on this (the article suggests as much). But if you place a limit on it then you’ve got one implementation of the standard that can decode certain characters and another that can’t. Better to have one standard that puts a hard limit on the number of bytes and another standard that uses more bytes and so on.
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