Unicode

1 definition found

From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (27 SEP 03) [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 Jurgen Bettels and F. Avery Bishop's paper {Unicode:
          A universal character code
          (http://research.compaq.com/wrl/DECarchives/DTJ/DTJB02/DTJB02SC.TXT)}.
       
          (2002-08-06)
       
          2.  Pre-{Fortran} on the {IBM 1103}, similar to
          {MATH-MATIC}.
       
          [Sammet 1969, p.137].
       
          (1997-11-15)