ASCII-Code

The ASCII code (abbreviation for American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a basic international character set used in computers and other electronic devices to encode characters such as letters, numbers, punctuation marks and control characters.

Originally developed in the 1960s, the ASCII code is a standard that allows computers to interpret and display characters in a standardized way. Each character in the ASCII code is represented by a unique 7-bit binary number, which means that there are a total of 128 characters in the ASCII character set.

In addition to the numbers from 0 to 9, the ASCII code also includes upper and lower case letters of the Latin alphabet, punctuation marks such as the comma and period as well as control characters such as the line break and the space character.

One of the main functions of the ASCII code is to provide a standardized method of exchanging text data between different computer systems and platforms. Because the ASCII code is widely used and supported by most modern computer systems, text files can be easily exchanged between different devices and software applications.

Although the ASCII code is a basic international character set, it has some limitations, particularly with regard to the representation of characters in other languages and writing systems. To support non-English languages, extensions such as the Unicode standard have therefore been developed, which includes a larger number of characters and writing systems.

Despite these developments, however, the ASCII code remains an important part of computer technology and continues to be used in many applications and operating systems, particularly for the representation of text data in English and for the basic control of computer systems.