Lyrics

I am the very model of a modern text encoding scheme,
a million scalars, astral planes, and UTFs like six-&-teen,
and UAX and UTR, collation, bidi, properties,
I am the very model of a modern text encoding scheme.

I am the very model of a modern text encoding scheme,
with Latin, Greek and IPA, Cyrillic Hebrew Syriac,
Bengali Tamil Arabic,  MaLAY-a-LAM Ethiopic,
Sinhala Thai Lao Kannada, Tagalog Runic Ogham Greek...

Syllabics Aboriginal, Mongolian and Balinese,
Math-maticals, and Braille, Khmer, plus Glagolitic, Latin-C,
And OCR and Number Forms and Letterlike Symbology,
Combining Diacriticals, Box Drawing, Dingbats, Currency!

There’s Bopomofo, Hiragana, Coptic and Han Radicals,
and Unihan and Unihan and Unihan and Unihan
and Unihan and Unihan and Unihan and Unihan
and Unihan and Unihan and Unihan and Unihan...

And Yi, and More Cyrillic, Latin, someday soon some Javanese
& Hangul Hangul Hangul Hangul, Surrogate Points, Private Use,
The Arab Presentation forms, the Halfwidth and f-E-ff,
I am the very model of a modern text encoding scheme!

One hundred thousand characters and lots of meta-dater,...
But still no Klingon coded there, you’ll have to come back later!

(Sung to the tune of  "I am the Very Model of a Modern Major General", by Gilbert and Sullivan. Lyrics Copyright 2008 Jim DeLaHunt, and freely available under a  Creative Commons 3.0 CC-BY-SA license.)

Background

At the 32nd Internationalization and Unicode Conference, 8-10 Sept 2008 at San Jose, California,  there was a celebration of the 20th anniversary of Unicode . The organisers put out a call for poetry, songs, and other (brief, humourous) tributes to Unicode.

I heard about this on Monday morning, got inspiration from a break-time conversation, and then was lost to much of the Monday afternoon session as I worked out the lyrics. I had a copy of the Unicode Base Multilingual Plane Roadmap in front of me as I wrote. And the lyrics do roughly follow the order of the roadmap.

Article and lyrics copyright 2008  Jim DeLaHunt, and freely available under a Creative Commons 3.0 CC-BY-SA license.