Comparing EBCDIC, ASCII, Unicode and UTF-8 for Storing Characters
Since everything in a computer is stored as a number, storing characters requires agreeing on a mapping between character and integers. There are a number of standards for that mapping including EBCDIC, ASCII, Extended ASCII, and Unicode. The choice of mapping affects things like how hard it is to know if a character is an upper case letter, so there are pros and cons to each of these choices. In addition to agreeing on the mapping, we also have to agree how those integers will be stored into the bits of the machine. While EBCDIC and ASCII use a very simple encoding, Unicode uses a large number of integers, so there are many ways we can choose to store it. Most commonly, Unicode is stored with UTF-8 which is a variable length encoding. The end result is backwards compatible to ASCII and has a lower average bytes per word than a fixed length encoding of Unicode would have.
In this video I'll walk you through:
Each of the three encodings (EBCDIC, ASCII, and Unicode)
The pros and cons of choosing each of those encodings
How integers (like those in Unicode) can be stored using UTF-8
Why UTF-8 is a good choice for storing Unicode values
TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
0:10 EBCDIC
1:05 ASCII
1:17 Comparing ASCII and EBCDIC
1:47 Weakness of EBCDIC and ASCII
1:58 Extended ASCII
2:10 Unicode
2:31 Storing the mapped integers
2:56 UTF-8
4:18 Unicode + UTF-8
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