Hangeul codes cannot be discussed independently of Chinese and special characters because of their mutual relationships with Hangeul. Many symbols other than Hangeul and Chinese characters are also necessary, but they need not be given fixed codes. Rather, they are dependent on the options of individual users. Hangeul needs about 1,000 old characters, and some additional but now missing characters are needed in Chinese. And about 100 old written forms in Ku-Gy?l and Idu may be necessary in Korean linguistics. Besides those characters, Japanese, Greek, English phonetic symbols, or graphic symbols may be necessary for the special purposes of individual users. These characters present no choice but to use them in the ensured domain of user-definable characters for more convenient use. This domain must include at least 1,000 characters. The domain is for just 1,146 2-byte characters.

To summarize the discussion thus far, Hangeul can admit 16,399 syllables in all beyond the constraints of the current Hangeul orthography, and 4,966 Chinese characters. Besides, 1,146 user-defined characters can be used as complete style codes for missing Chinese or old Korean written forms. Since 16,399 possible Hangeul syllables in the combination style include some old consonants and vowels, quite a few old Korean characters are actually not used. If we should exclude unnecessary old Korean characters through a close examination in the future--in other words, necessary and sufficient old Korean characters are to be listed to form a complete set, these can be put together with the current Hangeul to become a permanent code system of the complete style. In that case, the domain of codes would be more efficiently used so that it would be capable of admitting many more Chinese characters.

The problem of Hangeul in computers is ultimately that of how many of current Hangeul characters, old Korean written forms and Chinese characters can be admitted. However, since this thesis only discusses what lies within reach of just a small extension of the current combination style of Hangeul, it finally suggests a desirable model of codes of characters which improves on the deficiency of the current code system of the combination style.


＊ × indicates impossibility owing to the constraint of MS-DOS
＊ Hangeul: 16,399 characters (23 initial, 23 medial, 30 final)
＊ Chinese: 4,966 characters
＊ FONT: 1,146 (User-definable characters)
＊ Blanks: 768 (Code assignment constraints)

[supervised by Robert, W. Leitch]