What is the basic difference between Unicode and ISCII code?
Unicode uses a 16 bit encoding that provides code point for more than 65000 characters (65536). Unicode Standards assigns each character a unique numeric value and name. Unicode standard provides the capacity to encode all of the characters used for the written languages of the world. ISCII uses 8 bit code which is an extension of the 7 bit ASCII code containing the basic alphabet required for the 10 Indian scripts which have originated from the Brahmi script. There are 15 officially recognized languages in India. Apart from Perso-Arabic scripts, all the other 10 scripts used for Indian languages have evolved from the ancient Brahmi script and have a common phonetic structure, making a common character set possible. The ISCII Code table is a super set of all the characters required in the Brahmi based Indian scripts. For convenience, the alphabet of the official script Devnagari has been used in the standard.
