[netcruiser]

"it is certainly possible, albeit uninteresting, to come up with an unreasonable definition of "character" such there are more than 65536 of them".

They probably didn't foresee the "unreasonable" and "uninteresting" use of emojis.

[krispyfi]

I was thinking more of Han Unification, which we now realize was a bad idea, and to this day makes it difficult if not impossible to correctly render a block of text that contains characters in more than one CJK language.