Unicode now replaces older character encodings, such as ASCII, ISO 8859, and EUC, at all levels. Unicode enables users to handle practically any script or language used on this planet. It also supports a comprehensive set of mathematical and technical symbols to simplify scientific information exchange.
UTF-8 encoding is defined in ISO 10646-1:2000 Annex D (https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/ISO-10646-UTF-8.html) and in RFC 3629 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3629.txt), as well as Section 3.9 of the Unicode 4.0 standard. It does not have the compatibility problems of Unicode and earlier wide-character encodings. With UTF-8 encoding, Unicode can be used in a convenient and backward-compatible way in environments that were designed entirely around ASCII, such as Unix. UTF-8 is the way in which Unicode is used under Unix, Linux, macOS, and similar systems. It is clearly the way to go for using Unicode under Unix-style operating systems.
