A
standard for representing
characters as
integers. Unlike
ASCII, which uses 7
bits for each character, Unicode uses 16 bits, which means that it can represent more than 65,000 unique characters. This is a bit of overkill for English and Western-European
languages, but it is necessary for some other languages, such as Greek, Chinese and Japanese. Many analysts believe that as the
software industry becomes increasingly global, Unicode will eventually supplant ASCII as the standard character coding
format.