What is the name of the new coding scheme that uses 16 bits and replaced ASCII ?
Select one:
a. ASCII2
b. beta
c. Unicode
d. CAD
The correct answer and explanation is:
The correct answer is c. Unicode.
Unicode is a character encoding standard designed to provide a unique number for every character, no matter what platform, program, or language. It was created to replace older encoding schemes like ASCII, which had a limited character set. ASCII uses 7 or 8 bits to represent characters, allowing it to encode only 128 or 256 characters, respectively. This limited range made it unsuitable for handling non-English characters or symbols from other languages.
In contrast, Unicode uses 16 bits, which can represent 65,536 characters, and this range is extendable through multi-byte sequences to accommodate more than a million characters. Unicode supports characters from virtually all writing systems, including Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and many others. This makes it a universal standard for text representation across different platforms and languages.
One of the major advantages of Unicode over older coding schemes like ASCII is its ability to handle text in multiple languages simultaneously, which is essential in today’s globalized world. Unicode is backward-compatible with ASCII, meaning the first 128 characters in Unicode are identical to those in ASCII, making it easier to transition from one standard to another.
Unicode also plays a crucial role in modern software development, ensuring that text can be correctly displayed, processed, and transmitted in diverse applications such as websites, databases, and operating systems. By enabling consistent character representation across different systems, Unicode has become the global standard for text encoding, allowing for better integration of various languages and symbols in digital content.