Counting the size of one character remains an open problem in computer science

A few months ago, my friend Mark wrote in asking why my assembler doesn't support UTF-8. He was asking in regard to this post where one could simply assign the the value of 3.14159265358979323846 to the symbol of π. I replied back saying it would probably be more work than it was worth doing (at least for what I want out of an aseembler for an obsolete 8-bit CPU). If I were to do it correctly the amount of data required to properly support the various categories of characters would be rather large. On this Unicode Category Table, I count 30 unique categories possible. For all the Unicode codepoints, that's a table four megabytes in size (not that bad these days, but it still doesn't sit right with me, as my first computer only had 16,384 bytes total to work with) and full support for such categories can lead to rather odd results, where “₀⁤𝕏𝟬᠋𝟶𝟶⁰🯰⓪🯴⁤𝟻．０⁰​⁰𝟯🯶｡𛲠⁵𝟚⁸­𝟞₆️” encodes a valid IP address per the function getaddrinfo() (from “Pushing the Limits with getaddrinfo” via Lobsters). I…

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