ASCII

2009-02-13T18:26:21Z

Ralphr: expand with example

'''ASCII''' is a common historical [[character encoding]], designed to represent US English text in digital form. The acronym stands for [[America]]n [[Standard]] [[Code]] for [[Information]] [[Interchange]]. Most of the character encodings in use today are [[proper superset]]s of ASCII: these include the [[ISO 8859]] family of encodings, the [[Windows 1252]] code page, and [[Unicode]].

In ASCII, each letter or number on the [[keyboard]] is assigned a number from 0 to 127. For example, "A" is assigned the value 65, "B" is assigned 66, and "C" is assigned 67, so the word "[[cab]]" would be represented in ASCII as "67 65 66". As well as the 26 letters of the [[English alphabet]] and the [[number]]s from 0 to 9, many common [[punctuation]] symbols are assigned codes.

ASCII was originally designed to work on [[mainframe]] computers, so naturally the first 31 ASCII values were assigned to "[[control character]]s", such as [[carriage return]] and [[line feed]], which were used to manipulate early [[teletype]] machines (a kind of [[printer]]). Most of these early ASCII "control characters" have become obsolete, and many modern ASCII implementations do not even bother to assign them, preferring to start the mapping at 32 (ASCII [[space]]).

Because there are 128 separate codes, an ASCII character can be represented by a [[signed char]] type in the [[C]] programming language.

[[Category:Information technology]]

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ASCII