Unicode

1. character A 16-bit character set standard, designed and

maintained by the non-profit consortium Unicode Inc.

Originally Unicode was designed to be universal, unique, and

uniform, i.e., the code was to cover all major modern written

languages (universal), each character was to have exactly one

encoding (unique), and each character was to be represented by

a fixed width in bits (uniform).

Parallel to the development of Unicode an ISO/IEC

standard was being worked on that put a large emphasis on

being compatible with existing character codes such as ASCII

or ISO Latin 1. To avoid having two competing 16-bit

standards, in 1992 the two teams compromised to define a

common character code standard, known both as Unicode and

BMP.

Since the merger the character codes are the same but the two

standards are not identical. The ISO/IEC standard covers only

coding while Unicode includes additional specifications that

help implementation.

Unicode is not a glyph encoding. The same character can be

displayed as a variety of glyphs, depending not only on the

font and style, but also on the adjacent characters. A

sequence of characters can be displayed as a single glyph or a

character can be displayed as a sequence of glyphs. Which

will be the case, is often font dependent.

See also Jurgen Bettels and F. Avery Bishop's paper Unicode:A universal character code.

(2002-08-06)

2. language Pre-Fortran on the IBM 1103, similar to

MATH-MATIC.

[Sammet 1969, p.137].

(1997-11-15)