Universal Character Set
Unicode and the ISO/IEC 10646 Universal Character Set (UCS) have a much wider array of characters and their various encoding forms have begun to supplant ISO/IEC 8859 and ASCII rapidly in many environments. While ASCII is limited to 128 characters, Unicode and the UCS support more characters by separating the concepts of unique identification (using natural numbers called "code points") and encoding (to 8-, 16- or 32-bit binary formats, called UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32).