What does ASCII stand for?

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It is a character encoding standard used for representing text in computers and other devices that use text. Each character in the ASCII standard corresponds to a specific numeric value, which is represented in binary code, allowing for the consistent representation of text across different systems and platforms.

The standard was developed in the early 1960s and became widely adopted for data exchange because it provides a way to encode characters including letters, digits, punctuation marks, and control characters. This encoding system is foundational for text processing, ensuring that characters are represented uniformly regardless of the hardware or software being used.

Understanding ASCII is crucial for anyone working with text in programming, as it lays the groundwork for more complex encoding systems that accommodate a wider variety of characters, such as Unicode, which includes characters from multiple languages and symbols.