3.5.5.2 ASCII and Unicode.

Question 1

What does ASCII stand for?

Answer 1

American Standard Code for Information Interchange.

Question 2

What are Unicode and ASCII examples of?

Answer 2

Information coding systems (ICS).

Question 3

How many bits does ASCII make use of and what does this mean?

Answer 3

ASCII makes use of 7 bits to represent 128 (=2^7) different characters including A to Z, 0 to 0 and various symbols.

Question 4

Why was UNICODE introduced?

Answer 4

To represent a wide variety of alphabets by computers. This was necessary as the internet became more widely used throughout the world and there was a requirement for an ICS that could represent not just the Latin alphabet but also Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek and Hebrew.

Question 5

How many bits does the standard Unicode use?

Answer 5

From anywhere between 8 to 48 bits (1 to 6 bytes) per character. This allows Unicode to represent a much wider range of different characters than ASCII.

Question 6

Why can Unicode represent more characters than ASCII?

Answer 6

Unicode uses more bits per character than ASCII, allowing for a larger range of characters to be represented.