Universal Character Set

The international standard ISO/IEC 10646 defines the Universal Character Set (UCS) as a character set on which many encodings are based. It contains nearly a hundred thousand abstract characters, each identified by an unambiguous name and an integer number called its code point. Characters (letters, numbers, symbols, ideograms, logograms, etc.) from the many languages, scripts, and traditions of the world are represented in the UCS with unique code points. The inclusiveness of the UCS is continually improving as characters from previously unrepresented writing systems are added.
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<character, standard> (UCS, ISO/IEC 10646) A 1993 ISO and IEC standard character set, also known as "Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set".
UCS comes in 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 its infancy, though some moves, such as the Java language defining a character to be 16 bits, are suggestive.
[Relationship with Unicode?]
(1997-07-04)