This section provides background technical information on how Quantum stores data.

The computer maintains a table in which it stores all the characters is recognizes in a variety of formats. This allows it to read and write information in decimal, octal, hexadecimal or ASCII (text) format. The information in this table is available to Quantum. This is referred to as the ASCII character set.

Quantum has a similar table which tells it the relationship between characters in the ASCII character set and multicodes which may appear in the data. The multicodes are listed in the same order as their corresponding characters in the ASCII character set so that, for example, position 101 in the ASCII table contains the letter A while position 101 in the punch code table contains the multicode ‘&1’. This means that if you create a data file containing just the letter A, you can write a statement of the form:

to check the contents of this column as punched codes rather than as a single letter.

For Quantum to compare the contents of cell 101 in the two tables, it needs to look at the contents in the same format. The format it uses is octal.