Distributed multilingual applications of the OSI architecture

摘要

The merging of ISO l0646 and Unicode standards provides a single Universal Character Set (UCS) that contains all world's written language characters. It will replace ASCII as an international character codeset to design computer systems for supporting universal languages. Further work needs to be done in incorporating he UCS into historical operating systems, programming languages, existing software programs, and network protocols. In this paper, we review internal and external representations of the UCS, and propose a byte encoding for the UCS. The proposed encoding is a better external code for data storage and transmission in terms of the bit usage and code spaces for character representations. It is an ASCII-compatible textual representation of the UCS. A wide character code functions library that is based on a fixed-width of l6-bit encoding is developed in the context of XPG4. We will present a Unicode Programming Platform (UPP). The UPP is built on top of X Window to support codeset--independency applications. Also, we will describe an abstract data type of multilingual data with the UCS and ASN.l in the presentation layer, and implement a compiler for translating extended ASN.1 data types into corresponding C/C + + data types for data exchange of distributed applications and multilingual communications.