Patent ID: 7089494

Claim:
A computer-readable medium having stored therein a data structure in the form of a language module for storing data strings used by a display management module to display information on a display terminal, wherein said data structure comprises a string data area stored in a range of memory addresses in the computer-readable medium, wherein said string data area includes a plurality of data strings to be displayed by the display management module, wherein each character of each data string is a character selected from the group consisting of standard ASCII, extended ASCII, and double byte characters, wherein said characters are stored in said string data area based on an escape code having a value selected such that all of the standard ASCII, extended ASCII, and double byte characters can be properly stored in the string data area, wherein by lowering or raising the value of the escape code, the number of unique double byte characters that may be encoded in the data strings can be increased or decreased, and wherein characters in a data string that are standard ASCII and extended ASCII characters having ASCII codes less than a selected escape code are stored by their ASCII representations in said string data area, while extended ASCII characters and standard ASCII characters, if any, having ASCII codes at least as great as the selected escape code and ASCII characters that identify double byte characters are encoded as two-byte codes and the encoded values are stored in said string data area.