universal character set

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)