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 Jürgen Bettels and F. Avery Bishop's paper Unicode: A universal
character code.
(2002-08-06)
2. <language> A pre-Fortran on the IBM 1130, similar to MATH-MATIC.
[Sammet 1969, p.137].
(2004-09-14)
Nearby terms:
unfold « unfold/fold « UNI « Unicode »
UniCOMAL » unicos » Uniface
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