What is the full form of ASCII


ASCII: American Standard Code for Information Interchange

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It is a method to define a set of characters for encoding text documents on computers. The ASCII codes represent computers and other communication devices that use text. It was the most common computer encoding on the World Wide Web until December 2007; after that, it was surpassed by UTF-8, which uses ASCII as a subset.

According to the ASCII standard, which stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, characters are assigned to the 256 slots available in the 8-bit code. Building ASCII decimal (Dec) numbers require the usage of binary, the most widely used computer language. The uppercase "h" character (Char) has a decimal value of 104, which is equivalent to the binary value "01101000".

The X3 group at the ASA created and initially published ASCII in 1963. (American Standards Association). Between 1967 and 1986, ten revisions to the ASCII standard were published, the first being ASA X3.4-1963.

How is ASCII pronounced?

"As-key" is how ASCII is pronounced.

History

ASCII was first adopted in 1963. In a short time, it became very popular and widely used in the computer world. It was first commercially used as a seven-bit teleprinter code promoted by Bell data services.

It is originally based on the English alphabet. It encodes 128 specified characters into a seven-bit binary integer. Initially, it was a 6-bit character set, but later it became a 7-bit character set.

ASCII columns

There are three distinct portions in the ASCII table.

  • System codes between 0 and 31 that cannot be printed.
  • Lower ASCII, in the range of 32 to 127. Older American systems used 7-bit character tables, which is where this table got its start.
  • Higher ASCII, in the range of 128 to 255. Characters in this section can be programmed; they depend on the language of the software or operating system you are using. This section also includes foreign letters.

Codes and Characters used in extended ASCII

Extended ASCII offers 128 extra characters by using eight bits in place of seven. This enables extended ASCII to support more characters, including special symbols, letters from other languages, and drawing characters.

Constraints of ASCII

Many languages find it restrictive to only be able to accept 256 characters, and Asian languages like Chinese find it impossible. Unicode was developed and embraced by all nations as a means of helping to get around this restriction.

Usage

Most computers use ASCII code to represent texts. It makes it possible to transfer data from one computer to another computer. The ASCII text files are used in DOS and UNIX-based operating systems. Text editors and word processors are capable of storing data in ASCII format, but it is not a default storage format.

Future of ASCII

The ASCII texts are not the best character encoding sets. So currently, it is being replaced by Unicode character sets. Only DOS and UNIX-based operating systems are using ASCII, while Windows OS is using new Unicode.


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