Software Internationalization Guide

Glossary
Software Internationalization Guide—526225-002
Glossary-6
PC
PC. Personal Computer codes. PC codes are an encoding standard that is popular on
East Asian personal computers.
POSIX. The Portable Operating System Interface, as defined by the Institute of Electrical
and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the American National Standards Institute
(ANSI). Each POSIX interface is separately defined in a numbered ANSI/IEEE
standard or draft standard. The application program interface (API), known as
POSIX.1, has become ISO/IEC IS 9945-1:1990.
POSIX locale. A special locale defined by the POSIX standard. Every standard C program
always starts up in the POSIX locale, which means that no locale-specific action takes
place, and the program operates in the ASCII mode. All library functions behave as
they do in standard C. Unless the program calls the setlocale() function, none of
the behavior changes. Also called the C locale or the C/POSIX locale.
process code. A uniform internal representation of a character from a character set. A
process code is the format in which programs manipulate data.
Shift-JIS. The name commonly used for the microcomputer encoding scheme for the JIS
standard. Shift-JIS implements JIS in 8-bit format, allowing direct (unescaped) access
to the 128 ASCII characters for compatibility.
TNS. HP computers that support the HP NonStop Kernel and that are based on complex
instruction-set computing (CISC) technology. TNS processors implement the TNS
instruction set.
TNS/R. HP computers that support the HP NonStop Kernel and that are based on reduced
instruction-set computing (RISC) technology. TNS/R processors implement the RISC
instruction set and are upwardly compatible with the TNS system-level architecture.
UCS-2. The Universal Coded Character Set-2. The lower two octets, row and cell, of the
ISO 10646 character layout. Also known as the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
UCS-4. The Universal Coded Character Set-4. All four octets, group, plane, row and cell, of
the ISO 10646 character layout.
Unicode. Code set that currently uses the two lower octets, row and cell, and does not
support levels of combining characters. Equivalent to ISO 10646 UCS-2, Level 3.
Uniforum. An international association of open-systems professionals that contributes to
various standards.
wide character. A fixed-width character that is wide enough to hold any coded character
your implementation supports. A wide character is an object of the wchar_t type
definition.
XPG. An acronym that stands for the X/Open Portability Guide.
XPG4. Commands and utilities that comprise a superset of the POSIX utilities.