Unicode

March 1996 / International Features / Organizing Babylon / Unicode

Today's international computing world uses a wide range of often inconsistent code pages for language support. These code pages employ single-byte characters or a single-/double-byte mixture. Unicode, however, is a fixed-width, 16-bit character set. It can represent more than 65,000 characters.
The current version of Unicode covers more than 39,000 characters from the world's alphabets, ideograph sets, and symbol collections. The developers of Unicode have set aside 6000 code numbers for special use.
Unicode makes it much easier for developers to store and process characters for a given language because each Unicode character has a unique value. This means that an E in English is the same as an E in French, because both English and French are written with the same script: Latin. They are not the same as an E in Russian, which shares the same glyph as the Latin E but belongs to the Cyrillic script.

Independence Good for Globalizing
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The best approach to globalizing software is to maintain strict language independence as long as possible. The Unicode scheme enables developers to handle all language issues under a single standard.

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Matthew Wilson
My approach to software engineering is far more pragmatic than it is theoretical--and no language better exemplifies this than C++.

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