coded character set

character, standard A mapping from a set of integers to a

set of characters. This mapping is generally 1:1 (i.e.,

bijective), for example, the code position 65 in ASCII

maps only to "A", and it's the only position that maps to "A".

There are several standard coded character sets, the most

widely used is ASCII, generally in its Latin-1 dialect,

with Unicode becoming slowly more common; while EBCDIC and

Baudot are extinct except in legacy systems.

A coded character set may include letters, digits,

punctuation, control codes, various mathematical and

typographic symbols, and other characters. Each character in

the set is represented by a unique character code (or "codeposition").

(1998-10-18)