The greatest advantage of 7-bit ASCII is that each character in the character set for English can be represented in a single byte. This makes storing text efficient and compact. The greatest disadvantage of 7-bit ASCII is that it represents a character set that is only suitable for English. ASCII can't properly represent other Romance languages based on the Roman alphabet, such as French, Spanish, German, the Scandinavian languages, or the Eastern European languages. For those, we must consider a more comprehensive character-encoding method—Unicode.
If we catalog all of the characters and ideograms for all of the languages on Earth—past and present—we find that 1,112,064 code points are needed to represent all of them with unique values. The term code point is used here instead of character because not all of the positions in this enormous code set are characters; some are ideograms. To represent a code...
