ASCIIról

ASCII stands for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It is a character encoding standard used for electronic communication. ASCII assigns a unique number to each letter, number, and special character. The original ASCII standard used 7 bits, allowing for 128 possible characters. These included uppercase and lowercase English letters, numbers 0-9, punctuation marks, and control characters. Later, an extended version called Extended ASCII was developed, which used 8 bits to represent 256 characters, allowing for additional symbols and accented characters.

The purpose of ASCII was to create a standardized way for computers to represent and process text. Before ASCII, different computer systems used their own proprietary character encoding schemes, making it difficult to exchange data between them. ASCII provided a common language for computers, enabling them to communicate and share information effectively. It became the foundation for many subsequent character encoding standards.

Many modern character encoding systems, such as Unicode, are built upon or compatible with ASCII. ASCII characters are a subset of Unicode, meaning that any text represented in ASCII can be directly represented in Unicode without loss of information. This backward compatibility has been crucial for the smooth transition to more comprehensive encoding standards. ASCII remains relevant today, particularly in contexts where simplicity and broad compatibility are prioritized, such as in plain text files and certain programming environments.