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unicode

unicode


  1  definition  found 
 
  From  The  Free  On-line  Dictionary  of  Computing  (13  Mar  01)  [foldoc]: 
 
  Unicode 
 
  1.    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  Jürgen  Bettels  and  F.  Avery  Bishop's  paper  {Unicode: 
  A  universal  character  code 
  (http://www.digital.com/info/DTJB02/DTJB02SC.TXT)}. 
 
  2.    Pre-{Fortran}  on  the  {IBM  1103},  similar  to 
  {MATH-MATIC}. 
 
  [Sammet  1969,  p.137]. 
 
  (1997-11-15)