The Giga Character Set reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004
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Giga Character Set

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The Giga Character Set is a display code scheme created by Coventive Technologies, which claims to overcome Unicode's perceived CJKV flaws. Instead of assigning binary codes to characters, GCS is a set of encryption algorithms (one per language) that are used to transition between natural language characters and computer bits. GCS also claims to be faster and require less memory than Unicode because it derives characters rather than looking them up.