How is Unicode different from ASCII in data representation?

Unicode is a more extensive character set than ASCII, capable of representing a wider range of characters and symbols.

ASCII, or American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard that was developed in the 1960s. It uses 7 bits to represent each character, which allows it to represent a total of 128 different characters. This includes the English alphabet (both upper and lower case), digits from 0 to 9, and a selection of punctuation marks and special characters. However, ASCII is limited in that it can only represent characters used in the English language.

On the other hand, Unicode is a more modern and comprehensive character encoding standard. It was developed to overcome the limitations of ASCII and other similar character encoding systems. Unicode uses between 8 and 32 bits to represent each character, which allows it to represent over a million different characters. This includes not only all the characters represented by ASCII, but also characters from virtually all written languages around the world, as well as a wide range of symbols, emojis, and other special characters.

In addition to its greater range of characters, Unicode also offers other advantages over ASCII. For example, it provides a consistent way of encoding characters, regardless of the platform, program, or language being used. This makes it easier to share and display text across different systems and applications. Furthermore, Unicode supports 'combining characters', which are characters that can be combined with others to create new characters. This feature is particularly useful for representing languages that use diacritical marks, such as accents and tildes.

In summary, while ASCII was sufficient for the early days of computing when English was the dominant language, the global nature of today's digital world requires a more versatile character encoding system. Unicode fulfils this need by providing a comprehensive, consistent, and flexible way of representing a wide range of characters and symbols.