UNICHAR function (ODF 1.2 Pt 2)

["Alex Brown" <alexb@griffinbrown.co.uk>]

6.19.24:

----b
Semantics: Returns the character represented by the given numeric value.
Implementations shall support values between 1 and 0xFFFF, which is the
maximum possible value in UCS-2 encoding using two octets.
Implementations should allow N to be any legal character value in
UnicodeTM assuming UCS-4 encoding. Implementations should implement
UNICHAR such that UNICODE(UNICHAR(N)) returns N for any N >= 0.

Note: Depending on the application's encoding the string returned may be
actually longer than expected, for example in UTF-8 or UTF-16 encodings.
----e

* Why is support only mandated for characters in the range through
U+FFFF ? This potentially disenfranchises a large portion of the world's
population who use a wider character repertoire.

* Are characters that are forbidden in XML permitted to be returned by
this function?

* The note does not make sense to me. Surely the returned "string" will
always be exactly one character in length, and any encoding mechanism
will be opaque to users of the function?

- Alex.