Glossary

ANSI

American National Standards Institute. ANSI proposes standard definitions for different computing languages. The most recent standard for the C language, prepared by the ANSI C X3J11 Committee, includes library functions for computing with multibyte characters for international usage, as well as a new data type, wchar_t, for dealing with four-byte characters. This standard is not completed, so it is referred to as the "proposed ANSI C standard," or ANSI C-X3J11.

ASCII

American Standard Code for Information Interchange. A seven-bit code containing English upper and lowercase letters, punctuation, numbers and control codes. The eighth bit in each byte is used by different applications for parity checking, communication and message passing protocols, compacting data, or other purposes. Applications that are intended to be internationalized cannot utilize this bit if they are going to use multiple code sets or multibyte characters, and utilities that handle multiple code sets or multibyte characters.

BIG5

A commonly used code set in Taiwan.

Category

In the Traditional Chinese Solaris documentation set, category is related to localization. A category is a portion of a country's language representation and cultural conventions. For instance, the date is often represented in the U.S. as month, day, year; while in another country it might be day, month, year. The date and time can be thought of as one category of a local language. Categories also refer to the program categories, the environment variables that are related to categories, and the ANSI localization tables for each category.

Character Set

A character set is defined as a set of elements used for the organization, control, or representation of data. Character sets may be composed of alphabets, ideograms, or other units. This may seem a bit open-ended, but character sets may contain other character sets, which makes the boundaries unclear. For example, the CNS 11643 character set contains English, Greek, and Chinese character sets in addition to Chinese radicals and many other characters.

CNS

Taiwan's Chinese National Standard. This is the Taiwan analogue to ASCII. In this document set, it refers to the code set defined by CNS 11643. It contains the Chinese characters, phonetic symbols and radicals, control codes, punctuation, and western alphabets, including Roman and Greek characters. Each character is two bytes long, with the highest or most significant bit of each byte set to zero. In other words, it uses the lower seven bits of each byte. Due to the size of the Taiwan Chinese character set, they are divided into multiple codeplanes, with the default plane containing the most commonly used characters. ISO 2022 provides mechanisms for shifting from one codeplane to another.

After its revision in 1992, CNS 11643 defines 48,000 characters, which are divided among codeplanes 1-7, codeplanes 8-16 are undefined, but are included in the code set architecture. codeplanes 1 and 2 (common and rarely used characters) are unaffected by the revision. Characters that were in codeplane 14, a provisional user-defined plane, have been standardized into codeplane 3, with the overflow in codeplane 4.

Code set

Also called a coded character set, this is a set of unambiguous rules that establishes a character set and the one-to-one relationship between each character in the character set and its bit representation. For example, the English character set, including punctuation and numbers, can be mapped to the ASCII code set in such a way that each character corresponds to only one bit code, and no bit code corresponds to more than one character.

EUC

Extended UNIX Code. Describes four code sets modelled on ISO-2022. Each code set can contain one or more different character sets, like the Hangul and Hanja character sets in KS C 5601. The four code sets are referred to as codesets 0, 1, 2, and 3, and in this text they are sometimes abbreviated as cs0, cs1, cs2, and cs3. Other internationalization efforts sometimes call these g0, g1, g2, and g3. Codeset 0 is also called the primary code set, and codesets 1, 2, and 3 are called the supplementary code sets. In the Korean and Chinese implementations of the EUC codes, the primary code set (cs0) contains ASCII and begins with a zero in the most significant bit.

EUC-CNS

The EUC representation of CNS 11643. For Codeset 1, this is the normal CNS code with a one in the most significant bit of each byte. In other words, EUC-CNS equals CNS plus 0x8080. For example, the CNS character 0x212A becomes the EUC-CNS character 0xA1AA. Or in binary, 00100001 00101010 becomes 10100001 10101010. For Codesets 2 and 3, characters are also prefixed by single shift bytes SS2 and SS3. In addition, codeset 2 requires a codeplane byte. The code of a codeset-2 character is SS2 followed by codeplane byte followed by EUC-CNS. The codeplane byte is plane number added to 0xA0; for example plane 2 has codeplane bye 0xA2.

ISO

International Standards Organization. Composed of a number of professional societies and companies, this organization studies and makes recommendations on internationalization issues. ISO 2022 proposes and describes the Extended UNIX Codes. Other ISO proposals include the European 8-bit code and communication protocols for internationalization.

Locale

A locale describes a language or cultural environment. Its setting affects the display or manipulation of language-dependent features. Traditional Chinese Solaris software provides C for U.S.A, zh_TW for Traditional Chinese extended UNIX code, and zh_TW.BIG5 for the Traditional Chinese Big5 locale.

POSIX

Portable Operating System for Computer Environments. An IEEE standards group comprising seven committees that create documents for standardizing and internationalizing UNIX. POSIX document 1003.1 deals with the kernel and system calls. 1003.2 concerns the C-shell and standard libraries. The other five deal with real-time computing, communications and networking, and other issues.

Unicode

The international character set and encoding developed by the Unicode Consortium.

Wide Character Code (WC)

A constant-width four-byte code, called WC in Asian Solaris documentation, for the internal representation of EUC codes using the new ANSI-C data type wchar_t. Although EUC does not specify limits on the size of the supplementary code sets (codeset 0 is always one byte), WC specifies a character as four bytes. Standardizing on four bytes takes up more memory space than necessary if the environment is primarily ASCII, but it also speeds processing time for strings of mixed characters; the 1000th character always begins at byte 4000 (and the 0th character starts at byte 0). This is useful for any type of indexing in applications.

X/Open

X/Open started as a consortium of international UNIX vendors from Europe, USA, and Asia. It is now one of the major standards organizations like POSIX and ANSI; source of X/Open System Interface Portability Guide.