TRANSFER Programming Manual

SCREEN COBOL Character Maps
National Language and Character Set Support
7–8 40970 Tandem Computers Incorporated
When the Danish correspondent receives this message, the o-slash character is
displayed in the name displayed on the "TO" line of the message.
To continue this example, when someone at another terminal transmits a name
containing the o-slash to the German correspondent's terminal, it would appear on the
German correspondent's screen as a slash mark (/) followed by an "o." If the sender
transmits this name to a different recipient, the way that it appears on that recipient's
terminal depends on the character map in effect for the session at that terminal; for
example:
If this map contains an o-slash character, that is the character that appears on the
recipient's screen.
If the map does not include an o-slash, the recipient instead will see an "o"
preceded by whatever escape character is used for "/" in the map.
In other cases, escape characters are used to represent ligature characters that appear
in print as two characters joined together. An example is the Danish character that
looks like a combined A and E. To represent that character on a terminal not
configured for the Danish character map, a correspondent enters the first component
character, a concatenation symbol, and the second component character. The
concatenation symbol is selected by the system administrator; the standard ASCII
maps supplied by Tandem use a plus sign (+) for this purpose.
For example, to represent the Danish character just mentioned using the standard
concatenation character, a correspondent enters:
A+E
If extension or escape characters are allowed in names on your TRANSFER system,
your application must be able to check the extension or escape characters and validate
the names. You will need to write special name-scanning code to handle this task.
SCREEN COBOL
Character Maps
SCREEN COBOL provides a kind of character mapping that is separate and
completely independent of that furnished by the TRANSFER delivery system.
In SCREEN COBOL, the CHARACTER-SET clause is used to provide limited support
of foreign character sets other than US ASCII. You select the character set and
mapping by specifying a "character set type" (such as French QWERTY or
Danish/Norwegian) in this clause. When you specify a character set type that is
different from the current setting for the terminal, that character set type takes effect at
the first DISPLAY BASE statement in a SCREEN COBOL program unit. That character
set type then remains in effect until the program unit completes
execution, at which time the original character set type is reinstated.
The character set type determines the characters that SCREEN COBOL accepts in
PIC A fields. It also defines its own upshift rule that identifies the uppercase
equivalent of any character in the name character set.
Some SCREEN COBOL character set types use the ASCII national use character codes
to stand for non-English characters. These codes are then accepted in PIC A fields and