| #### Ensuring Character and Code Set Interoperability A character set is a group of characters, such as the English alphabet, Japanese Kanji, or the European character set. To enable world-wide connectivity, DCE guarantees that a minimum group of characters is supported in the DCE. The DCE RPC communications protocol ensures this guarantee by requiring that all DCE RPC clients and servers support the DCE Portable Character Set (PCS). The set of DCE PCS characters consists of: · 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 · : ; < = > ? @ [ ] ^ _ ` ' ~ { | } ! " # $ % & ( ) * + - . / <space> · a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z · A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A code set is a mapping of the members of a character set to specific numeric code values. Examples of code sets include ASCII, EBCDIC, JIS X0208 (Japanese Kanji), and ISO 8859-1 (also known as Latin-1.) The DCE RPC communications protocol automatically converts DCE PCS characters between the ASCII and EBCDIC code sets, if necessary. DCE RPC also provides constructs and routines for character and code set interoperability between non-PCS, or international characters. These features permit programmers to write DCE RPC applications that guarantee character and code set interoperability between clients and servers in a DCE that supports a variety of languages and encodings for those languages. ####