Art of Assembly Language, 1st Edition

4.15. 4.15 Character Sets

Character sets are another composite data type, like strings, built upon the character data type. A character set is a mathematical set of characters with the most important attribute being membership. That is, a character is either a member of a set or it is not a member of a set. The concept of sequence (e.g., whether one character comes before another, as in a string) is completely foreign to a character set. If two characters are members of a set, their order in the set is irrelevant. Also, membership is a binary relation; a character is either in the set or it is not in the set; you cannot have multiple copies of the same character in a character set. Finally, there are various operations that are possible on character ...