You might want to use Unicode support for your application in two situations. The first situation is if your application is an international application and requires support for several different languages. The Unicode character set provides an easy way to allow a single application to handle any language or character set. The application can perform all input, processing, and output using Unicode characters. Another situation for using Unicode support is for porting a 7-bit ASCII application. Because the UTF-8 character set is a superset of 7-bit ASCII, an ASCII application can be ported more easily to a UTF-8 environment than to an EBCDIC environment.