Transition from ANSI to Unicode: Multilingual Support in Operating Systems and Programming Languages

Abstract

Character sets are one of basic issues for information interchange. Most current character sets extend ANSI's 7-bit character set. These extensions are conflicted with each other and make the design of multilingual information systems complicated. Unicode or Universal Character Set (UCS) is a character set that covers symbols in major written languages. Text files and strings usually have no header to indicate which character set is in use, and they currently use ANSI by default. The transition from ANSI to Unicode may last a longer time than expected. This paper presents the following methods to help the transition: 1) A text file format of fixedwidth characters 2) Atagged string storage: Each string has a tag representing which character set or coding format is in use. 3) A method for assigning the format of string literals. These methods can improve multilingual support without introducing muchcomplexity.