Question

(d) Explain the need of ASCII and Unicode?

Answer 1

When all is said and done, computers store a series of numbers in memory. Letters have numerical values. ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) was originally a 7-bit system for encoding letters. It was later expanded to 8-bits so more symbols could be encoded.

8-bits allows for 256 characters to be encoded. As computers have spread around the world, the characters of other languages need set encodings. The result (at this point) is Unicode. Unicode-8 is pretty much ASCII-8, but Unicode-16 allows for 65536 encodings.

Answer 2

ASCII and Unicode are character-encoding schemes. They are, simply, a means for computers to express characters and text, even though all data in computers are stored as bits and not actual letters.

Answer 3

http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode (and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode for a more advanced description of Unicode)

Although ASCII enables computers to deal with simple characters and control characters, it is limited to the English Alphabet (and some weird symbols like ☺ and ☻)

Unicode, the modern standard for encoding characters, enables the expression of several other character sets like the arabic, european, and chinese alphabet. The most common unicode scheme is UTF-8, and the other UTFs are used mainly for some complex asian alphabet stuff I think.

Answer 4

ASCII = basic American notation, with limited set of rules. UNICODE = more international and universal character set, for a more global world. With extra space requirements, of course.