HP 3000 Manuals HP 3000 Manuals
Chapter 11 Double-Byte Character Set
Introduction to Double-Byte Character Set Support
(VSC2) (MF)
Many of the world's languages use sets of characters that run into the
thousands. Most computers use 8-bit bytes, and assign a different 8-bit
code to represent each character; this scheme can represent no more than
256 different characters.
Ideally a COBOL programmer should not need to be aware of the internal
code used to represent characters. However, in practice some features of
the internal code can affect the source programmer, and this limitation
to 256 different characters is one of the most restricting of these.
For this reason the Double-Byte Character Set (DBCS) is provided. In
this scheme each character is represented by a 16-bit code, each
character occupying a pair of adjacent bytes. This scheme can represent
thousands of different characters.
The assignment of DBCS character codes to characters varies from country
to country.
The 8-bit code used by your COBOL system is the American Standard Code
for Information Interchange (ASCII). In this chapter this will be
referred to as the Single-Byte Character Set (SBCS).
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|(MF) |
|Double-Byte Character set support is sensitive to the DBCS directive. |
|See your COBOL System Reference for details. |
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