IDL supports a char type, which represents an 8-bit quantity. The ISO Latin-1 (8859.1) character set defines the meaning and representation of graphic characters. The meaning and representation of null and formatting characters is the numerical value of the character as defined in the ASCII (ISO 646) standard. Unlike C/C++, type char cannot be qualified as signed or unsigned. (The octet type, below, can be used in place of unsigned char.)