International Character Sets

Glossary

attribute

Part of the numerical encoding of a character.

augmented character

A type specifier that is equivalent to character except for character I/O operations when it indicates that the bits and font attributes of the character are preserved.

base characters

Single-byte characters of type base-character.

base strings

Strings that consist solely of base characters.

bits attribute

Extra flags that are associated with a character. The bits attribute is most often used to support character input from extended keyboards that have meta and control keys. This is an extension to Common Lisp.

characters

Common Lisp data objects that represent printed symbols or operations for formatting text.

character external code

A non-negative integer that uniquely identifies a character in a coded character set.

character repertoire

An unordered set of abstract characters, independent of coding, visual representation, or font. The English alphabet and the Kanji characters are separate character repertoires.

code attribute

The numerical encoding of a character.

coded character set

The mapping between the characters in one or more character repertoires and a number that serves as the character code for that particular set.

environment variables

Variables provided by certain operating systems and by Liquid Common Lisp that allow you to customize the operating system and the Lisp environment respectively.

EUC

Extended UNIX Codes. A description of four character sets, which include the Kanji and Katakana character sets.

extended characters

Double-byte characters of type extended-character, which are used to encode multibyte characters such as Japanese Kanji characters.

external format

An implementation-dependent encoding scheme for representing characters in files.

font attribute

Extra flags that specify the style of a character's glyph, such as italic. This is an extension to Common Lisp.

general string

A string that can contain either base characters or extended characters.

glyph

The visual representation of a graphic character.

graphic character

A character data object that can be displayed or printed; it is also called a printing character.

Hiragana

A set of phonetic characters used to represent Japanese. Each character corresponds to a spoken syllable.

JIS

Japanese Industry Standard, the Japanese equivalent to ASCII that includes standards for computing in the Japanese environment.

Kana-Kanji conversion facility

A conversion facility that allows you to enter Japanese Kanji characters from a standard Western keyboard. To use the conversion facility, you type the phonetic pronunciation in Roman characters, and the conversion facility proposes a Kanji equivalent.

Kanji

A set of Japanese ideograms adopted from China.

Katakana

A set of phonetic characters for representing spoken Japanese. In modern Japanese writing, Katakana is usually used to represent foreign words.

keyword

A symbol preceded by a colon (:mode,:value, and so forth).

optional parameter

A symbol that is not required for a function to work properly; in the syntactic description, the symbol&optional precedes the optional parameter.

parameter

A symbol whose value is determined by the arguments that you supply when you invoke a function.

printing character

A character data object that can be displayed or printed.

rest parameter

A construct that allows a function to have an unspecified number of arguments; it is indicated by the symbol&rest in the syntactic description.

Romaji

Japanese written in the Roman alphabet.

simple base string

A simple string of base characters.

simple general string

A simple string that can contain both base and extended characters.

simple string

A string that does not have a fill pointer, is not displaced to another string, and whose size is not adjusted dynamically after creation.

standard characters

A subtype of characters defined by Common Lisp. The standard characters consist of the newline character and the 95 printing characters, which include the space character.

string

A Common Lisp data object that is a vector whose elements must be of type character.

syntax

Standardized grammatical rules and patterns.

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