characteristic

adj : typical or distinctive; "heard my friend's characteristic

laugh"; "red and gold are the characteristic colors of

autumn"; "stripes characteristic of the zebra" [ant: {uncharacteristic}]

n 1: a prominent aspect of something: "the map showed roads and

other features"; "generosity is one of his best

characteristics" [syn: {feature}]

2: a distinguishing quality

3: the integer part (positive or negative) of the

representation of a logarithm; in the expression log 643 ◦

2.808 the characteristic is 2

character set

1. A particular mapping between {characters} and

{byte strings}, i.e. the combination of a particular

{character encoding} (which maps between byte strings and

{integers}) and a particular {coded character set} (which maps

between integers and characters).

For example: {ASCII} (the ASCII coded character set, encoded

directly as single-byte values), or {UTF-8} (the Unicode coded

character set, encoded with an 8-bit transformation method).

2. Occasionally: a {character repertoire}; or a {coded

character set}.

(1998-12-17)