Computer Science · Ch 2 — Encoding Schemes and Number System
Indian Script Code for Information Interchange (ISCII)
2.1.2
Indian Script Code for Information Interchange (ISCII)
ASCII covers English only — so how do we use Indian languages on computers? To make that possible, a common standard for coding Indian scripts, called ISCII — Indian Script Code for Information Interchange — was developed in India during the mid 1980s.
Key facts about ISCII
- It is an 8-bit code representation for Indian languages.
- With 8 bits, the number of characters it can represent is:
2^8 = 256 characters
- Backward-compatible with ASCII: ISCII retains all 128 ASCII codes unchanged, and uses the remaining 128 codes for the additional Indian-language character set.
- The additional codes for the aksharas (the letters/syllables) of the language are assigned in the upper region, 160–255.