Universal Character Set

(UCS, ISO/IEC 10646) A 1993 {ISO} and

{IEC} standard {character set}, also known as "Universal

Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set".

UCS comes in two flavours: a 16-bit variant called UCS-2 and a

32-bit variant 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 in its infancy, though

some moves, such as the {Java} language defining a character

to be 16 bits, are tale-telling.

(1997-07-04)