94 
E exponential character string (ISO 6093 NR3; 8824 char real) 
F floating exponential, binary (ANSI/IEEE 754 "Floating Real") 
R floating exponential, binary (ASN.l, ISO 8824 "Real") 
Z character positions with no format explicitly defined 
The TYPE segments which define the concrete transfer syntax (formats) of 
the individual data fields will be: 
TYPE = givenName,(A,) ; 
TYPE = initial,(A,) ; 
TYPE = family Name,(A,) ; 
TYPE = dateOfBirth,(I,) ; 
TYPE = title,(A,) ; 
TYPE = number,(I,) ; 
TYPE = dateOfHire,(I,) ; 
TYPE = numberOfChildren,(I,) ; 
— Allows multiple initial 
- Semantics is YYYYMMDD 
— Allows multi-digit employee number 
- Semantics is YYYYMMDD 
All of the fields are variable-length, terminated with the comma delim 
iters. The "!" record delimiter is pre-defined within TSDN as the default 
value. All that now remains is to complete the mechanics of the TSDN 
syntax: 
MCAI = TSDN,1990-09 ; - Identifies TSDN date of issue 
UID = ASN.l Personnel Record Example ; — User-defined identification 
TYPE Segments 
OBJECT Segments — Segments as described above 
FILEID Segment 
END. -- Completes the Detail Section 
— If there were data records att 
ached, they would be here. 
eof — Completes the TSDN Module 
Data Conversion 
In a heterogeneous system containg diverse computers and programming 
languages, it is almost certain that the data as retrieved from a remote 
system or archive will be in different format than that required by the 
recipient. By using the description transmitted with the data (or on hand 
apriori) conversion routines may be invoked to convert the representations 
to the required form, with a minimum of intervention by the recipient. 
This is the point at which the retrieval request is answered. A service is 
anticipated, and being prototyped, which will read a TSDN description and 
deliver to the application a properly-formatted data entity. (This service 
is not part of TSDN per se, and is given here only as an illustration of a 
method of use of TSDN.)