American Standard Code for Information Interchange
ASCII standard, standard character set for letters and symbols | ||||
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American Standard Code for Information Interchange Definition from Computer & Internet Dictionaries & Glossaries
| FOLDOC |
American Standard Code for Information Interchange
The basis of character sets used in almost all present-day computers. US-ASCII uses only the lower seven bits (character points 0 to 127) to convey some control codes, space, numbers, most basic punctuation, and unaccented letters a-z and A-Z. More modern coded character sets (e.g., Latin-1, Unicode) define extensions to ASCII for values above 127 for conveying special Latin characters (like accented characters, or German ess-tsett), characters from non-Latin writing systems (e.g., Cyrillic, or Han characters), and such desirable glyphs as distinct open- and close-quotation marks. ASCII replaced earlier systems such as EBCDIC and Baudot, which used fewer bytes, but were each broken in their own way.
Computers are much pickier about spelling than humans; thus, hackers need to be very precise when talking about characters, and have developed a considerable amount of verbal shorthand for them. Every character has one or more names - some formal, some concise, some silly.
Individual characters are listed in this dictionary with alternative names from revision 2.3 of the Usenet ASCII pronunciation guide in rough order of popularity, including their official ITU-T names and the particularly silly names introduced by INTERCAL.
See V ampersand, asterisk, back quote, backslash, caret, colon, comma, commercial at, control-C, dollar, dot, double quote, equals, exclamation mark, greater than, hash, left bracket, left parenthesis, less than, minus, parentheses, oblique stroke, percent, plus, question mark, right brace, right brace, right bracket, right parenthesis, semicolon, single quote, space, tilde, underscore, vertical bar, zero.
Some other common usages cause odd overlaps. The "#", "$", ">", and "&" characters, for example, are all pronounced "hex" in different communities because various assemblers use them as a prefix tag for hexadecimal constants (in particular, "#" in many assembler-programming cultures, "$" in the 6502 world, ">" at Texas Instruments, and "&" on the BBC Micro, Acorn Archimedes, Sinclair, and some Zilog Z80 machines). See also splat.
The inability of US-ASCII to correctly represent nearly any language other than English became an obvious and intolerable misfeature as computer use outside the US and UK became the rule rather than the exception (see software rot). And so national extensions to US-ASCII were developed, such as Latin-1.
Hardware and software from the US still tends to embody the assumption that US-ASCII is the universal character set and that words of text consist entirely of byte values 65-90 and 97-122 (A-Z and a-z); this is a major irritant to people who want to use a character set suited to their own languages. Perversely, though, efforts to solve this problem by proliferating sets of national characters produced an evolutionary pressure (especially in protocol design, e.g., the URL standard) to stick to US-ASCII as a subset common to all those in use, and therefore to stick to English as the language encodable with the common subset of all the ASCII dialects. This basic problem with having a multiplicity of national character sets ended up being a prime justification for Unicode, which was designed, ostensibly, to be the *one* ASCII extension anyone will need.
A system is described as "eight-bit clean" if it doesn't mangle text with byte values above 127, as some older systems did.
See also ASCII character table, Yu-Shiang Whole Fish.
(1995-03-06)
The basis of character sets used in almost all present-day computers. US-ASCII uses only the lower seven bits (character points 0 to 127) to convey some control codes, space, numbers, most basic punctuation, and unaccented letters a-z and A-Z. More modern coded character sets (e.g., Latin-1, Unicode) define extensions to ASCII for values above 127 for conveying special Latin characters (like accented characters, or German ess-tsett), characters from non-Latin writing systems (e.g., Cyrillic, or Han characters), and such desirable glyphs as distinct open- and close-quotation marks. ASCII replaced earlier systems such as EBCDIC and Baudot, which used fewer bytes, but were each broken in their own way.
Computers are much pickier about spelling than humans; thus, hackers need to be very precise when talking about characters, and have developed a considerable amount of verbal shorthand for them. Every character has one or more names - some formal, some concise, some silly.
Individual characters are listed in this dictionary with alternative names from revision 2.3 of the Usenet ASCII pronunciation guide in rough order of popularity, including their official ITU-T names and the particularly silly names introduced by INTERCAL.
See V ampersand, asterisk, back quote, backslash, caret, colon, comma, commercial at, control-C, dollar, dot, double quote, equals, exclamation mark, greater than, hash, left bracket, left parenthesis, less than, minus, parentheses, oblique stroke, percent, plus, question mark, right brace, right brace, right bracket, right parenthesis, semicolon, single quote, space, tilde, underscore, vertical bar, zero.
Some other common usages cause odd overlaps. The "#", "$", ">", and "&" characters, for example, are all pronounced "hex" in different communities because various assemblers use them as a prefix tag for hexadecimal constants (in particular, "#" in many assembler-programming cultures, "$" in the 6502 world, ">" at Texas Instruments, and "&" on the BBC Micro, Acorn Archimedes, Sinclair, and some Zilog Z80 machines). See also splat.
The inability of US-ASCII to correctly represent nearly any language other than English became an obvious and intolerable misfeature as computer use outside the US and UK became the rule rather than the exception (see software rot). And so national extensions to US-ASCII were developed, such as Latin-1.
Hardware and software from the US still tends to embody the assumption that US-ASCII is the universal character set and that words of text consist entirely of byte values 65-90 and 97-122 (A-Z and a-z); this is a major irritant to people who want to use a character set suited to their own languages. Perversely, though, efforts to solve this problem by proliferating sets of national characters produced an evolutionary pressure (especially in protocol design, e.g., the URL standard) to stick to US-ASCII as a subset common to all those in use, and therefore to stick to English as the language encodable with the common subset of all the ASCII dialects. This basic problem with having a multiplicity of national character sets ended up being a prime justification for Unicode, which was designed, ostensibly, to be the *one* ASCII extension anyone will need.
A system is described as "eight-bit clean" if it doesn't mangle text with byte values above 127, as some older systems did.
See also ASCII character table, Yu-Shiang Whole Fish.
(1995-03-06)
| Glossary of the European Information Society |
ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange)
It is the standard code system used on PCs. This is the de facto world-wide standard for the code numbers used by computers to represent all the upper and lower-case Latin letters, numbers, punctuation, etc. There are 128 standard ASCII codes each of which can be represented by a 7 digit binary number: 0000000 through 1111111.
It is the standard code system used on PCs. This is the de facto world-wide standard for the code numbers used by computers to represent all the upper and lower-case Latin letters, numbers, punctuation, etc. There are 128 standard ASCII codes each of which can be represented by a 7 digit binary number: 0000000 through 1111111.
| A Glossary of Internet & PC Terminology |
ASCII
American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It is a standard way of representing ordinary text as a stream of binary numbers. A code set of 128 characters. The first 32 characters are control codes & the remaining 96 are upper & lower case letters, numbers, punctuation marks & special characters.
American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It is a standard way of representing ordinary text as a stream of binary numbers. A code set of 128 characters. The first 32 characters are control codes & the remaining 96 are upper & lower case letters, numbers, punctuation marks & special characters.
| WebGuest Web Glossary |
ASCII - American Standard Code for Information Interchange
World-wide standard for the code numbers assigned to each key on the keyboard. ASCII text does not include formatting and therefore can be exchanged and read by most computer systems.
World-wide standard for the code numbers assigned to each key on the keyboard. ASCII text does not include formatting and therefore can be exchanged and read by most computer systems.
| Jensen's Technology Glossary |
ASCII
American Standard Code for Information Interchange computer character set (text and symbols) that enables transfer of text and data between different computing systems. This international standard provides only very plain text without options for font modifications. For example, files from word processors such as Microsoft Word, Word Perfect, and Word Star often cannot be imported to hypertext or hypermedia software without conversion to ASCII code (most word processors will change files to ASCII "text" files). The downside is that nearly all formatting and font variations are lost in ASCII conversions such that imported ASCII text may have to be re-formatted line by line and altered for font preferences. Very few software alternatives have "filters" that import word processor files directly without having to convert to ASCII codes, although many are now adding rich-text format (RTF) utilities. In hypertext authoring, choice of a hypertext software option should include a question concerning whether "filters" are available for avoidance of ASCII text conversions. (See alsoANSI , Internet Messaging , and Rich-text format )
American Standard Code for Information Interchange computer character set (text and symbols) that enables transfer of text and data between different computing systems. This international standard provides only very plain text without options for font modifications. For example, files from word processors such as Microsoft Word, Word Perfect, and Word Star often cannot be imported to hypertext or hypermedia software without conversion to ASCII code (most word processors will change files to ASCII "text" files). The downside is that nearly all formatting and font variations are lost in ASCII conversions such that imported ASCII text may have to be re-formatted line by line and altered for font preferences. Very few software alternatives have "filters" that import word processor files directly without having to convert to ASCII codes, although many are now adding rich-text format (RTF) utilities. In hypertext authoring, choice of a hypertext software option should include a question concerning whether "filters" are available for avoidance of ASCII text conversions. (See alsoANSI , Internet Messaging , and Rich-text format )
| Internetworking Terms |
American Standard Code for Information Interchange
A standard character-to-number encoding widely used in the computer industry. See also: EBCDIC.
A standard character-to-number encoding widely used in the computer industry. See also: EBCDIC.
| Noman's Java(TM) Glossary |
ASCII
American Standard Code for Information Interchange. A standard assignment of 7-bit numeric codes to characters. See also Unicode .
American Standard Code for Information Interchange. A standard assignment of 7-bit numeric codes to characters. See also Unicode .
American Standard Code for Information Interchange Definition from Language, Idioms & Slang Dictionaries & Glossaries
| WordNet 2.0 |
American Standard Code for Information Interchange
Noun
1. (computer science) a code for information exchange between computers made by different companies; a string of 7 binary digits represents each character; used in most microcomputers
(synonym) ASCII
(hypernym) code, computer code
(part-meronym) ASCII character
(classification) computer science, computing
Noun
1. (computer science) a code for information exchange between computers made by different companies; a string of 7 binary digits represents each character; used in most microcomputers
(synonym) ASCII
(hypernym) code, computer code
(part-meronym) ASCII character
(classification) computer science, computing
| hEnglish - advanced version |
american standard code for information interchange
american standard code for information interchange
the basis of character sets used in almost all present-day computers. us-ascii uses only the lower seven bits ( character points 0 to 127) to convey some control codes , space, numbers, most basic punctuation, and unaccented letters a-z and a-z. more modern coded character sets (e.g., latin-1 , unicode) define extensions to ascii for values above 127 for conveying special latin characters (like accented characters, or german ess-tsett), characters from non-latin writing systems (e.g., cyrillic, or han characters ), and such desirable glyphs as distinct open- and close-quotation marks. ascii replaced earlier systems such as ebcdic and baudot, which used fewer bytes, but were each broken in their own way.
american standard code for information interchange
the basis of character sets used in almost all present-day computers. us-ascii uses only the lower seven bits ( character points 0 to 127) to convey some control codes , space, numbers, most basic punctuation, and unaccented letters a-z and a-z. more modern coded character sets (e.g., latin-1 , unicode) define extensions to ascii for values above 127 for conveying special latin characters (like accented characters, or german ess-tsett), characters from non-latin writing systems (e.g., cyrillic, or han characters ), and such desirable glyphs as distinct open- and close-quotation marks. ascii replaced earlier systems such as ebcdic and baudot, which used fewer bytes, but were each broken in their own way.
American Standard Code for Information Interchange Definition from Science & Technology Dictionaries & Glossaries
| Telecommunication Standard Terms |
| Abbreviation Airbus A340 |
ASCII
American Standard Code for Information Interchange: ASCII code is used for datatransfer e.g. for datalinks by acars.
American Standard Code for Information Interchange: ASCII code is used for datatransfer e.g. for datalinks by acars.
| RF Electronics |
American Standard Code For Information Interchange (ASCII)
An eight-level code for data transfer adopted by the American Standards Association to achieve compatibility between data services. Binary numbers from 0 to 127 that represent the upper and lowercase letters of the alphabet, the numbers 0 to 9, and the several symbols found on a keyboard. A block of eight 0s and 1s are used to represent all of these characters.
An eight-level code for data transfer adopted by the American Standards Association to achieve compatibility between data services. Binary numbers from 0 to 127 that represent the upper and lowercase letters of the alphabet, the numbers 0 to 9, and the several symbols found on a keyboard. A block of eight 0s and 1s are used to represent all of these characters.
American Standard Code for Information Interchange Definition from Encyclopedia Dictionaries & Glossaries
| Wikipedia English - The Free Encyclopedia |
American Standard Code for Information Interchange
American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), generally pronounced ask-ee ([1]), is a character encoding based on the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that work with text. Most modern character encodings — which support many more characters than did the original — have a historical basis in ASCII.
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