TRANSFER Programming Manual

Base Character Set
National Language and Character Set Support
7–4 40970 Tandem Computers Incorporated
Base Character Set The base character set is the group of all characters that your particular TRANSFER
system stores and makes available for message text. (The base character set is
sometimes also known as the canonical character set.) With the exception of input text
for item data, all text input and output within TRANSFER UOWs consists of
characters from the base character set. Text emitted in TAREQ event packages is also
restricted to characters from this set; so is text processed by the clients that Tandem
supplies.
Input text for item data is usually exempt from this restriction because it is usually not
interpreted or used by the TRANSFER delivery system. This is true even when the
item data appears in packaged items submitted for delivery. The only item data that is
used by the TRANSFER delivery system, and that is therefore restricted to characters
from the base character set, appears in the following types of records:
The three types of item data records mapped using a session's character maps:
TO recipient records
CC recipient records
SUBJECT records
(Appendix A lists the applicable record type codes.)
The item data records in TAREQ event packages
The standard base character set appears as part of the standard USASCII character
map in Appendix D. This character set basically contains Western European
characters. It includes all graphic and formatting characters defined in both the
American National Standards Institute (ANSI) 1977 and International Standards
Organization (ISO) 8859/1 standards. This is the character set that is shipped with the
TRANSFER delivery system. Another base character set, based on the Hebrew
alphabet, is also available from Tandem.
Name Character Set Part of the base character set is the group of characters that the TRANSFER delivery
system accepts within the simple names that identify certain objects: correspondents,
distribution lists, folders, and named instances of items within folders. This group is
known as the name character set.
The standard name character set supplied with the TRANSFER delivery system is a
subset of the standard base character set.
Character Maps A character map is a set of rules for internally representing characters in the base
character sets. These rules map—or establish—a correspondence between the internal
code that the terminal uses to represent each character on the keyboard or screen and
the character itself. These maps support the characters used in corresponding national
languages.
The TRANSFER delivery system allows different character maps to be associated with
individual sessions and correspondents. The main importance of these different