ASCII

ASCII is a 7-bit character encoding scheme. ASCII is short for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It defines all characters used in the English language, but not sufficient for most other languages (like French, German, ...). All modern character encodings are usually based on ASCII, so they define characters past the 0...127 range defined by ASCII.

Overview

ASCII defines the range:

• 0..31 - Control characters
• 32..63 - Various symbols
• 64..95 - Upper case characters + some symbols
• 96..127 - Lower case characters + some symbols

History

Work on the ASCII standard began in May 1961, with the first meeting of the American Standards Association's (ASA) (now the American National Standards Institute or ANSI) X3.2 subcommittee. The first edition of the standard was published in 1963.

Application

ASCII (or an extended version of it) is used in pretty much any modern computing system.

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