Universal Character Set


Universal Character Set

(character, standard)(UCS, ISO/IEC 10646) A 1993 ISO andIEC standard character set, also known as "UniversalMultiple-Octet Coded Character Set".

UCS comes in a 16-bit variant called UCS-2 and a 32-bitvariant called UCS-4, which is composed of 16-bit UCS-2"planes". So far only one 16-bit plane has been defined,which is known as the Basic Multilingual Plane.

The implementation of UCS is still in its infancy, though somemoves, such as the Java language defining a character to be16 bits, are suggestive.