What is the full form of ASCII ?

What is the full form of ASCII?

American Standard Code for Information Interchange is referred to as ASCII. The letters, numbers, punctuation, and other symbols used in electronic communication and computing are represented by special numeric codes in this character encoding scheme.

History on ASCII

The character encoding standard known as ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) was created in the early 1960s. The American Standards Association (ASA), which eventually evolved into the American National Standards Institute, created it (ANSI). The original goal of ASCII was to create a standard way of encoding characters for use in electronic communication, such as telegraphy and teletype machines.

Before the development of ASCII, there were many different character encodings in use, which made it difficult for different computer systems to communicate with each other. ASCII provided a standard way to encode the English alphabet, numbers, punctuation marks, and other characters, using a 7-bit binary code.

The first version of ASCII was published in 1963 and included 128 characters, which could be represented using 7 bits. The 128 characters included uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, punctuation marks, and control characters, such as the carriage return and line feed characters. The ASCII standard was later extended to include additional characters, such as accented characters and symbols, which required the use of 8 bits.

ASCII quickly became the dominant character encoding standard for electronic communication and computing, and it is still widely used today. However, with the globalization of computing and the need to support non-English languages and scripts, ASCII has been largely replaced by other character encoding standards, such as Unicode. Nevertheless, ASCII remains an important part of computing history and its influence can still be seen in modern character encoding standards.

Features of ASCII

Here are some features of ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) −

• Character set − The ASCII character set has 128 distinct characters, including capital and lowercase letters, numerals, punctuation marks, and control characters. It employs a 7-bit binary code to represent these characters.

• Compatibility − ASCII is compatible with a wide range of computer systems and is used for text-based communication in a variety of applications, including email, messaging, and document processing.

• Standardization − ASCII is a standardized character encoding that provides a consistent way to represent characters across different computer systems and programming languages.

• Simplicity − The simplicity of ASCII makes it easy to use and implement, which was one of the reasons for its early success in the computing industry.

• Backward compatibility − ASCII is backward compatible with many earlier character encoding systems, which made it easy to transition to ASCII from older systems.

• Efficiency − Because ASCII uses a 7-bit binary code, it is more efficient than other character encoding systems that use 8 or more bits to represent characters.

• Limited character set − While ASCII is useful for representing characters in the English language, it has limitations when it comes to representing characters in other languages and scripts. This limitation has led to the development of other character encoding systems, such as Unicode, which can represent a much wider range of characters.

Benefits and Limitations

Here are some benefits and limitations of ASCII −

Benefits

• Standardization − ASCII is a standardized character encoding system that provides a consistent way to represent characters across different computer systems and programming languages. This makes it easy for different systems to communicate with each other and share data.

• Compatibility − ASCII is compatible with a wide range of computer systems and is used for text-based communication in a variety of applications, including email, messaging, and document processing.

• Simplicity − The simplicity of ASCII makes it easy to use and implement, which was one of the reasons for its early success in the computing industry.

• Efficiency − Because ASCII uses a 7-bit binary code, it is more efficient than other character encoding systems that use 8 or more bits to represent characters.

• Backward compatibility - ASCII is backward compatible with many earlier character encoding systems, which made it easy to transition to ASCII from older systems

Limitations

• Limited character set − ASCII can only represent 128 different characters, which is a limitation when it comes to representing characters in other languages and scripts. This limitation has led to the development of other character encoding systems, such as Unicode, which can represent a much wider range of characters.

• English language bias − ASCII was developed primarily for use in the English language, and it does not include characters that are specific to other languages or scripts. This can make it difficult to represent text in languages other than English.

• Lack of support for formatting − ASCII does not include support for formatting, such as bold or italic text, which can be a limitation when working with formatted text.

• Lack of support for graphics and multimedia − ASCII is limited to representing text characters and does not include support for graphics, multimedia, or other types of data.

• Incompatibility with non-text data − ASCII is not suitable for representing non-text data, such as images, audio, or video. Other encoding systems, such as binary encoding, are used for these types of data.

Conclusion

In conclusion, The widely used character encoding technique known as American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) offers a uniform method for representing text in computer systems. ASCII assigns a unique code to each of the 128 characters it supports, using 7 bits to represent each character. This allows computers to easily convert between the binary representation of the code and the corresponding character.

FAQs

Q1. How is ASCII different from EBCDIC?

Ans. IBM created the character encoding technique known as EBCDIC (Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code), which employs 8 bits to represent each character. Certain IBM mainframe systems still employ EBCDIC, which was created to enable non-Latin scripts like Hebrew and Arabic in contrast to ASCII.

Q2. What is the difference between ASCII and Unicode?

Ans. The main difference between ASCII and Unicode is that Unicode can represent characters from almost all languages and writing systems, while ASCII is limited to a few western languages. Unicode uses a variable-length encoding scheme, which allows it to represent over a million characters by using up to four bytes for each character.

Q3. What are the limitations of ASCII?

Ans. ASCII only uses 128 unique symbols, which is not enough to represent all the characters in many languages. This led to the development of extended character encoding systems, such as Unicode, which can represent thousands of characters.