Vietnam adopts uniform computer coding standard for Vietnamese language
HANOI, Vietnam - Vietnam's government has adopted a uniform system for
representing the Vietnamese language in computers, replacing several
incompatible systems currently in use, an official said Wednesday.
As of the beginning of next year, all government and ruling Communist
Party
agencies will use the Unicode standard, according to a decision signed
Monday by Deputy Prime Minister Pham Gia Khiem, the official said.
Unicode is a 16-bit character encoding system which contains all of the
characters in common use in the world's major languages, including
Vietnamese.
ASCII, an earlier system still widely used for encoding Western
languages,
uses only 7 bits of data for each character, which restricts the total
number of characters it can represent.
Currently, several different computer coding systems are used to
represent
Vietnamese letters. The most common include VNI, VPS, VISCII, TCVN (ABC)
and
Unicode.
Although the Vietnamese language uses Roman letters, it also uses
special
markings which are added to the letters to designate vowel variations
and
tones.
Individuals and private businesses will not be required to use Unicode,
but
will be strongly encouraged to do so, said the official of the Ministry
of
Science, Technology and Environment.
The government will also urge Communist Party and government agencies to
convert archival documents which use other codings to Unicode, said the
official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The Associated Press - June 12, 2002
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