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ASCII
(pronounced AS kee)
American Standard Code for
Information Interchange. This is a standard system that assigns a
specific number code to each possible keyboard character.
Representing data in ASCII code can make it possible to transfer
information between otherwise incompatible computer systems.
More Detailed Definition:
Acronym for the American Standard
Code for Information Interchange. Pronounced ask-ee, ASCII is a
code for representing English characters as numbers, with each
letter assigned a number from 0 to 127. For example, the ASCII
code for uppercase M is 77. Most computers use ASCII codes to
represent text, which makes it possible to transfer data from one
computer to another.
Text files stored in ASCII format are sometimes called ASCII
files. Text editors and word processors are usually capable of
storing data in ASCII format, although ASCII format is not always
the default storage format. Most data files, particularly if they
contain numeric data, are not stored in ASCII format. Executable
programs are never stored in ASCII format.
The standard ASCII character set uses just 7 bits for each
character. There are several larger character sets that use 8
bits, which gives them 128 additional characters. The extra
characters are used to represent non-English characters, graphics
symbols, and mathematical symbols. Several companies and
organizations have proposed extensions for these 128 characters.
The DOS operating system uses a superset of ASCII called extended
ASCII or high ASCII. A more universal standard is the ISO Latin 1
set of characters, which is used by many operating systems, as
well as Web browsers.
Another set of codes that is used on large IBM computers is
EBCDIC.
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