[1] : The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (27 SEP 03)

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
     
     
see also:
character set iso iec ascii iso latin 1 bmp 
glyph encoding glyphs font lt;unicode: a universal character codegt; fortran 
ibm 1103 math-matic 

Unicode >> U Words
Unicode, definition of term: Unicode
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