ASCII

[Ben Pfaff]

Edward Glowacki <glowack2@msu.edu> writes:

[...authoritative definition of ASCII?...]

Try going to google and typing "ASCII definition".  The whole
Internet can't be wrong, right?  (Well...)

Here's the relevant entries from www.dict.org:

>From WordNet (r) 1.6 [wn]:

  ASCII
       n : (computer science) American Standard Code for Information
           Interchange; a code for information exchange between
           computers made by different companies; a string of 7
           binary digits represents each character;  used in most
           microcomputers [syn: {ASCII}]

>From Jargon File (4.2.2, 20 AUG 2000) [jargon]:

  ASCII /as'kee/ n.  [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 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 or the ae-ligature 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/texts/codes/index.html'.

-- 
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 any worse than the sound of peacocks not being shredded."
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