unicode

English translation: Unicode is...

15:21 Jan 17, 2003

English language (monolingual) [Non-PRO]
Tech/Engineering

English term or phrase: unicode

Could you please tell me the meaning and utility of *unicode* with reference to a language?

R. Chopra

Selected answer:Unicode is...

Explanation:
Unicode provides a unique number for every character,
no matter what the platform,
no matter what the program,
no matter what the language.

Fundamentally, computers just deal with numbers. They store letters and other characters by assigning a number for each one. Before Unicode was invented, there were hundreds of different encoding systems for assigning these numbers. No single encoding could contain enough characters: for example, the European Union alone requires several different encodings to cover all its languages. Even for a single language like English no single encoding was adequate for all the letters, punctuation, and technical symbols in common use.

These encoding systems also conflict with one another. That is, two encodings can use the same number for two different characters, or use different numbers for the same character. Any given computer (especially servers) needs to support many different encodings; yet whenever data is passed between different encodings or platforms, that data always runs the risk of corruption.

Unicode is changing all that!
Unicode provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language. The Unicode Standard has been adopted by such industry leaders as Apple, HP, IBM, JustSystem, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Sun, Sybase, Unisys and many others. Unicode is required by modern standards such as XML, Java, ECMAScript (JavaScript), LDAP, CORBA 3.0, WML, etc., and is the official way to implement ISO/IEC 10646. It is supported in many operating systems, all modern browsers, and many other products. The emergence of the Unicode Standard, and the availability of tools supporting it, are among the most significant recent global software technology trends.

Incorporating Unicode into client-server or multi-tiered applications and websites offers significant cost savings over the use of legacy character sets. Unicode enables a single software product or a single website to be targeted across multiple platforms, languages and countries without re-engineering. It allows data to be transported through many different systems without corruption.

Selected response from:

Spiros Doikas
Local time: 15:06

Grading comment

It is quite amazing that you provided so much useful information in no time. I wonder whather you typed the same or copied and pasted and somewhere! Great job!!
4 KudoZ points were awarded for this answer

SUMMARY OF ALL EXPLANATIONS PROVIDED

4 +12

Unicode is...

Spiros Doikas

compare to ASCII

Lia Fail (X)

A standard for representing characters

Michael Tovbin

Answers

4 mins confidence:

peer agreement (net): +12

Unicode is...

Spiros Doikas
Local time: 15:06
Native speaker of:

Greek
PRO pts in pair: 4

Grading comment

It is quite amazing that you provided so much useful information in no time. I wonder whather you typed the same or copied and pasted and somewhere! Great job!!

44 mins confidence:

compare to ASCII

Explanation:
Unicode, as opposed to the ASCII code.

Comparing them might explain better what they are.

Unicode is a code offering a far larger number of character possibilities (65000 compared to 256) than ASCII.

ASCII : Short for American Standard Code for Information Interexchange, ASCII is an industry standard, which assigns letters, numbers and other characters within the 256 slots available in the 8-bit code.

Unicode: A standard for representing characters as integers. Unlike ASCII, which uses 8 bits for each character, Unicode uses 16 bits, which means that it can represent more than 65,000 unique characters. This is a bit of overkill for English and Western-European languages, but it is necessary for some other languages, such as Greek, Chinese and Japanese. Many analysts believe that as the software industry becomes increasingly global, Unicode will eventually supplant ASCII as the standard character coding format.

http://www.google.ie/search?q=cache:E8vfUQ6uPC0C:www.weboped...

Lia Fail (X)
Spain
Local time: 14:06
Native speaker of:

English
PRO pts in pair: 86

55 mins confidence:

A standard for representing characters

Explanation:
In the most basic sense it is a table containing 2^16 individual cells (each numbered sequentially from 0 to 65535) with a letter or character in each cell represented by the appropriate sequential number.

Before Unicode each alphabet or character set had to be represented by a separate table. The Unicode table is large enough to represent all alphabets and other special characters known to man. That's all there is to it.

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Note added at 2003-01-17 16:22:54 (GMT)
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Unicode makes representing characters easier because before Unicode with a separate table for each language there were conflicts since each language table used the same number codes to represent different characters. Under Unicode all characters are in the same table so there is no conflict between languages and no incorrect representation.

Michael Tovbin
United States
Local time: 07:06
Native speaker of:

English,

Russian
PRO pts in pair: 108

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