Digital Multinational Character Set

The Digital Multinational Character Set is a set of 8-bit numeric values representing the alphabet, numerals, punctuation, and other symbols. The first 128 characters of the set (with decimal values from 0 through 127) are the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) characters. The remaining characters (with values from 128 through 255) are non-ASCII characters and can be used only in string constants and data with I/O statements.

The following table shows the first half of the Digital Multinational Character Set, which is the ASCII character set. The first half of each of the numbered columns identifies the character as you would enter it on a VT200 or VT100 series terminal or as you would see it on a printer (except for the nonprintable characters). The remaining half of each column identifies the character by the binary value of the byte; the value is stated in three radixes-octal, decimal, and hexadecimal. For example, the uppercase letter A has, under ASCII conventions, a storage value of hexadecimal 41 (a bit configuration of 01000001), equivalent to 101 in octal notation and 65 in decimal notation.

The following table shows the second half of the Digital Multinational Character Set (the non-ASCII characters, with decimal values 128 through 255). The first half of each of the numbered columns identifies the character as you would see it on a VT200 series terminal or printer; these characters cannot be output on a VT100 series terminal.