What are exotic character sets?

Question

I am reading a C ++ document, it says like this,

Wide characters are used primarily to represent non-English or exotic character sets.

What is the exact meaning for exotic character sets ?

Answer 1

I think that it does not have a “technical” meaning; it is used as in “strange” or “unusual” character sets.

Since we are talking about wide characters, in general we are talking about Unicode; I would say that Cuneiform or Klingon ¹ can be considered as "exotic character sets." Or even those Unicode blocks that are not intended for languages, but for symbols of various nature ( mathematical symbols , arrows , alchemical symbols , ...).

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• Actually not included in the Unicode standard, but available in PUA for some fonts ( link ).

Answer 2

I think that the author means such symbols as: § ¨ © ¢ ¡ U ï ð ¥ ¦ â ß à á â ã ¶ æ and likelikes!

Answer 3

Maybe a special encoding, which is mainly used for printing characters or an old encoding like IBM EBCDIC .