from
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (8 July 2008)
Universal Character Set
ISO 10646
ISO/IEC 10646-1
UCS
<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)