| Characters: Unicode | |||||||||||||
| Many world languages cannot be represented using 8-bit code. | |||||||||||||
| Unicode | |||||||||||||
| 16-bit representation | |||||||||||||
| 64K different symbols | |||||||||||||
| ASCII included as a subset (zero-extend to 16 bits) | |||||||||||||
| evolving standard | |||||||||||||
| version 2.0 supports 38,885 distinct characters from many languages | |||||||||||||
| supported by Java (char type is 2-byte) | |||||||||||||
| needs separate byte type | |||||||||||||