Characters

Written language is an amazing invention.
- Unlike spoken language, which evolved over eons in homo sapiens, the concept of a written form for language has been invented independantly a number of times.
- The earliest of these inventions quickly developed into Sumerian cuneiform around 3000 BC.
Wikipedia defines a character as a grapheme which is...
A grapheme designates the atomic unit in written language. Graphemes include letters, Chinese ideograms, numerals, punctuation marks, and other symbols.
Every language has a corresponding finite set of characters, whether it uses a phonetic system (like English) or one based on ideograms (like Chinese)
- A language's common character set tends to be pretty stable. When was the last time that English added a new character?
- Families of languages (e.g., Romance, Arabic) tend to converge to a common set of characters for many practical reasons.
So, it's natural to represent a character as an integer, which identifies the character in the character set.
The important computer character sets you should be familiar with are ASCII and Unicode
- ASCII, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, has 128 characters designed to encode the Roman alphabet used in English and other Western European languages.
- Unicode, or Universal Character Set, is an international standard designed to handle all known languages and is becoming widely used on the web.

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