1. ASCII
[originally an acronym (American Standard Code for Information
Interchange) but now merely conventional] The predominant character set
encoding of present-day computers. The standard version uses 7 bits for
each character, whereas most earlier codes (including early drafts of ASCII
prior to June 1961) used fewer. This change allowed the inclusion of
lowercase letters — a major win — but it
did not provide for accented letters or any other letterforms not used in
English (such as the German sharp-S ß. or the ae-ligature æ
which is a letter in, for example, Norwegian). It could be worse, though.
It could be much worse. See EBCDIC to understand
how. A history of ASCII and its ancestors is at http://www.wps.com/tex/definition/index.Computers are much pickier and less flexible about spelling than
humans; thus, hackers need to be very precise when talking about
characters, and have developed a considerable amount of verbal shorthand
for them. Every character has one or more names — some formal, some
concise, some silly. Common jargon names for ASCII characters are
collected here. See also individual entries for
bang, excl,
open, ques,
semi, shriek,
splat, twiddle, and
Yu-Shiang Whole Fish. This list derives from revision 2.3 of the Usenet ASCII pronunciation
guide. Single characters are listed in ASCII order; character pairs are
sorted in by first member. For each character, common names are given in
rough order of popularity, followed by names that are reported but rarely
seen; official ANSI/CCITT names are surrounded by brokets: <>.
Square brackets mark the particularly silly names introduced by
INTERCAL. The abbreviations “l/r” and
“o/c” stand for left/right and “open/close”
respectively. Ordinary parentheticals provide some usage
information. |
Definitions of ASCII 
