programming is terriblelessons learned from a life wasted

Are 16 bits, providing at most 65,536 distinct codes, sufficient to encode all characters of all the world’s scripts? … The answer to this is Yes.

In other words, given that the limitation to 65,536 character codes genuinely does satisfy all the world’s modern communication needs with a safety factor of about four.

The Unicode Standard, 1988, with an unremarkable lack of foresight.