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.
[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.
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
splat, twiddle, and Yu-Shian
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.
