UTF-16 is specified in the latest versions of both the international standard ISO/IEC 10646 and the Unicode Standard. "UCS-2 should now be considered obsolete. It no longer refers to an encoding form in either 10646 or the Unicode Standard." There are no plans to extend UTF-16 to support a larger number of code points or the code points replaced by surrogates, as this would violate the Unicode Stability Policy with respect to general category or surrogate code points. (any scheme that remains a self-synchronizing code would require allocating at least one BMP code point to start a sequence. Changing the purpose of a code point is disallowed).