ASCII: Difference between revisions
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[[Category:Encyclopedia]]
'''ASCII''' stands for <i>American Standard Code For Information Interchange</i>. It was first created in 1963 and is the basis for standardized data encoding methods such as [[Unicode]] that almost all computers follow today. The original ASCII standard defines 128
==Control Codes==
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* 27: <code>ESC</code>. This is the Escape key!
* 32: This is what you get when you hit the spacebar. (It's a blank space.) This was the most convenient location for the space character to be, as it's just in front of the actual visible characters. Old-school computers often implemented ASCII by using the value associated with each character as an index for a lookup-table of tile graphics stored in ROM, and having the beginning be the blank space meant that you could convert ASCII to the table format by simply subtracting 32, and a video memory that is initialized to zero will show blank spaces instead of whatever character happens to be at that index.
* 127: <code>DEL</code>. This is the Delete key, and is also the last standardized ASCII code. For some reason it's not placed with the other control codes.
Anything from 128 to 255 was dependent on the hardware and/or the program being run. Many programs used this extra space to represent letters with accent marks common to non-English languages that used the Latin alphabet, as well as rudimentary character graphics to allow for simple game creation (such as playing card suits, smiley faces, stickmen, etc.)
==Numbers==
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