TACL Reference Manual

HP NonStop TACL Reference Manual—429513-018
2-1
2 Lexical Elements
TACL consists of these lexical elements:
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Character Set
•
Special Characters
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Constants
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Reserved Words
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Comments
Character Set
TACL supports the ISO 8859.1 (International Organization for Standardization)
character set, also called the ECMA-94 (European Computer Manufacturers
Association) character set, which is an 8-bit character set with 256 character positions.
The first 128 characters are the same as the ASCII (American Standard Code for
Information Interchange) character set; ISO 8859.1 is a superset of ASCII.
The high-order 128 positions include 94 characters that are used in the majority of
western European languages, plus two additional formatting characters: a nonbreaking
space and an optional or discretionary hyphen.
Data
You can use all characters in the ISO character set as data.
Variable Names
You can use all printable characters in TACL variable names; however, you can use
only the low-order (ASCII) characters in the names of systems, disk volumes,
subvolumes, files, processes, and devices.
Upshifting
TACL automatically upshifts variable names when it defines them. If a variable name
contains lowercase letters that contain diacritical marks (marks added to a letter to
indicate a special phonetic value), those characters may lose their diacritical marks
when upshifted using CPRULES0. This upshifting can change the apparent identity of
the variable. To avoid errors, use uppercase letters if your variable name includes
diacritical marks.
TACL provides two files that contain coded rules for upshifting characters:
•
CPRULES0 contains the rules used by the majority of western European countries;
this is the default set of character-processing rules.
•
CPRULES1 contains the rules used primarily by Spain and French Canada.