ISO 10646 and Unicode

ISO 10646 and Unicode

ISO and the Unicode Consortium have jointly developed a character set designed to cover almost every character normally used by any language in the world. The characters have two- and four-byte representations. ISO calls this ISO IS 10646. The Unicode Consortium embraces a subset of 10646, called the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) of 10646, and calls it Unicode. The only characters defined in either standard are the characters in the BMP.

It appears that ISO 10646 will grow significantly in acceptance, but widespread use is still some years away.

This appendix contains an alphabetical list of ISO 3166 country codes.