1. <character> A 16-bit character set standard, designed andmaintained by the non-profit consortium Unicode Inc.
Originally Unicode was designed to be universal, unique, anduniform, i.e., the code was to cover all major modern writtenlanguages (universal), each character was to have exactly oneencoding (unique), and each character was to be represented bya fixed width in bits (uniform).
Parallel to the development of Unicode an ISO/IECstandard was being worked on that put a large emphasis onbeing compatible with existing character codes such as ASCIIor ISO Latin 1. To avoid having two competing 16-bitstandards, in 1992 the two teams compromised to define acommon character code standard, known both as Unicode andBMP.
Since the merger the character codes are the same but the twostandards are not identical. The ISO/IEC standard covers onlycoding while Unicode includes additional specifications thathelp implementation.
Unicode is not a glyph encoding. The same character can bedisplayed as a variety of glyphs, depending not only on thefont and style, but also on the adjacent characters. Asequence of characters can be displayed as a single glyph or acharacter can be displayed as a sequence of glyphs. Whichwill be the case, is often font dependent.
See also Jürgen Bettels and F. Avery Bishop's paper Unicode:A universal character code.
2. <language> A pre-Fortran on the IBM 1130, similar toMATH-MATIC.
[Sammet 1969, p.137].