Question

What does ASCII stand for?

Hint:

Although ASCII uses only 128 characters in its standard form, extended versions can represent up to 256 characters, including additional symbols, accented characters, and control codes.

Answer 1

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a character encoding standard used for representing text and control characters in computers and other electronic devices. It uses numerical values to represent letters, digits, punctuation marks, and control characters (such as newline and carriage return).
Key Features of ASCII:
Character Encoding:
ASCII assigns a unique number (between 0 and 127) to each character. For
Example:

The letter "A" is represented by the number 65.
The letter "a" is represented by the number 97.
The space character is represented by the number 32.

Standardized Code:
ASCII was developed in the 1960s and became the most widely used character encoding system for computers and communication equipment.
7-bit Encoding:
ASCII originally used a 7-bit code, which allows for 128 possible characters. Extended versions of ASCII use 8 bits to represent 256 characters.
Control Characters:
ASCII includes non-printable characters (such as bell, backspace, and escape), which are used for controlling devices like printers or terminals.
Example ASCII Values: \[ \begin{array}{|c|c|} \hline Character & ASCII Code
\hline \text{A} & 65
\text{B} & 66
\text{a} & 97
\text{b} & 98
\text{Space} & 32
\text{Enter} & 13 \, (\text{Carriage Return})
\hline \end{array} \] Summary:
- ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange . - It is a 7-bit encoding system that represents text and control characters using numeric values. - ASCII has been foundational in text representation and continues to be used today, with extensions like UTF-8 that support a wider range of characters.