To Unicode or Not to Unicode

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To Unicode or Not to Unicode 1. What is Unicode? Unicode is the coding scheme that supports 65, 000 unique characters. 2. What problems does Unicode solve? The problems that Unicode solves are it puts all characters on the same plane so they are represented with same number of bits. Unicode is effectively used as an interchange code. Unicode is still evolving so at anytime they can add more characters. 3. Describe a scenario where Unicode would be used Unicode would be used to translate characters of other languages. Characters of other fonts can exist together. Unicode overcomes all limitations so that the character can be in any font. Latin characters use shift-JIS and ASCII doesn’t recognize the punctuation or accents. 4. Currently ASCII is the most popular code for representing characters. What would be the advantages and disadvantages of a universal conversion to the Unicode scheme? The advantages of Unicode are that it can represent characters in other languages. The Unicode has enough characters and is still being created, adding more characters. It puts all characters on the same field, so that we can read documents in Latin and Chinese. It’s used as an interchange code. The disadvantages of Unicode are that you’d need multiple glyphs per Unicode code point and distinguish between each glyph for each code. If a computer cannot handle the null bytes then it could break if UTF-16 is used. Different computers have different processors, which determines if they use little or big-endian byte

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