ASCIIkoodausta

ASCIIkoodausta, often referred to as ASCII encoding, is a character encoding standard that uses numeric codes to represent text. Developed by the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, it assigns a unique number to each letter, digit, and punctuation mark. The most common version uses seven bits to represent 128 characters, including uppercase and lowercase English letters, numbers 0-9, common punctuation symbols, and control characters.

Initially, ASCII was designed for teletype machines and early computing devices. Its widespread adoption led to it becoming a de facto standard for digital communication and data storage. While the original ASCII standard is limited to 128 characters, extended ASCII versions exist, typically using eight bits to represent 256 characters, allowing for additional symbols and characters from various languages.

Despite its historical significance, ASCII has limitations. It cannot represent characters outside the Latin alphabet, making it unsuitable for multilingual contexts. Modern computing systems predominantly use Unicode, a more comprehensive standard that can represent virtually all characters from all writing systems, as well as emojis and symbols. However, ASCII remains a foundational element in computing, and many systems still maintain backward compatibility with it. Understanding ASCII is crucial for comprehending how text is represented and processed at a fundamental level in digital systems.