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more about ascii
ascii |
5 definitions found From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]: Ascii \As"ci*i\, Ascians \As"cians\, n. pl [L. ascii, pl of ascius Gr ? without shadow; 'a priv. + ? shadow.] Persons who at certain times of the year, have no shadow at noon; -- applied to the inhabitants of the torrid zone, who have twice a year, a vertical sun. 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 (4.2.3, 23 NOV 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 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}, {semi}, {shriek}, {splat}, {twiddle}, and {Yu-Shiang Whole Fish}. 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. ! Common: {bang}; pling; excl; not shriek; ball-bat;. Rare: factorial; exclam; smash; cuss; boing; yell; wow; hey; wham; eureka; [spark-spot]; soldier, control. " Common: double quote; quote. Rare: literal mark; double-glitch; ; ; dirk; [rabbit-ears]; double prime. # Common: number sign; pound; pound sign; hash; sharp; {crunch}; hex; [mesh]. Rare: grid; crosshatch; octothorpe; flash; , pig-pen; tictactoe; scratchmark thud; thump; {splat}. $ Common: dollar; . Rare: currency symbol; buck; cash; string (from BASIC); escape (when used as the echo of ASCII ESC); ding; cache; [big money]. % Common: percent; ; mod; grapes. Rare: [double-oh-seven]. & Common: ; amp; amper; and and sign. Rare: address (from C); reference (from C++); andpersand bitand background (from `sh(1)'); pretzel. [INTERCAL called this `ampersand'; what could be sillier?] ' Common: single quote; quote; . Rare: prime; glitch; tick; irk; pop; [spark]; single quotation mark>; . ( ) Common: l/r paren; l/r parenthesis; left/right; open/close; paren/thesis; o/c paren; o/c parenthesis; l/r parenthesis; l/r banana. Rare: so/already; lparen/rparen; ; o/c round bracket, l/r round bracket, [wax/wane]; parenthisey/unparenthisey; l/r ear. * Common: star; [{splat}]; . Rare: wildcard gear; dingle; mult; spider; aster; times; twinkle; glob (see {glob}); {Nathan Hale}. + Common: ; add Rare: cross; [intersection]. , Common: . Rare: ; [tail]. - Common: dash; ; . Rare: [worm]; option; dak; bithorpe . Common: dot; point; ; . Rare: radix point; full stop; [spot]. / Common: slash; stroke; ; forward slash. Rare: diagonal; solidus; over slak; virgule; [slat]. : Common: . Rare: dots; [two-spot]. ; Common: ; semi. Rare: weenie; [hybrid], pit-thwong. < > Common: ; bra/ket; l/r angle; l/r angle bracket; l/r broket. Rare: from/{into, towards}; read from/write to suck/blow; comes-from/gozinta; in/out; crunch/zap (all from UNIX); tic/tac; [angle/right angle]. = Common: ; gets; takes Rare: quadrathorpe [half-mesh]. ? Common: query; ; {ques}. Rare: quiz; whatmark [what]; wildchar huh; hook; buttonhook; hunchback. @ Common: at sign; at strudel. Rare: each vortex; whorl; [whirlpool]; cyclone; snail; ape; cat; rose; cabbage; . V Rare: [book]. [ ] Common: l/r square bracket; l/r bracket; ; bracket/unbracket. Rare: square/unsquare; [U turn/U turn back]. \ Common: backslash, hack, whack; escape (from C/UNIX); reverse slash; slosh; backslant backwhack Rare: bash; ; reversed virgule; [backslat]. ^ Common: hat; control; uparrow; caret; . Rare: xor sign, chevron; [shark (or shark-fin)]; to the (`to the power of'); fang; pointer (in Pascal). _ Common: ; underscore; underbar under Rare: score; backarrow skid; [flatworm]. ` Common: backquote left quote; left single quote; open quote; ; grave. Rare: backprime [backspark]; unapostrophe birk; blugle; back tick; back glitch; push single quotation mark>; quasiquote { } Common: o/c brace; l/r brace; l/r squiggly; l/r squiggly bracket/brace; l/r curly bracket/brace; . Rare: brace/unbrace; curly/uncurly; leftit/rytit; l/r squirrelly [embrace/bracelet]. A balanced pair of these may be called `curlies'. | Common: bar; or or-bar; v-bar; pipe; vertical bar. Rare: ; gozinta thru; pipesinta (last three from UNIX); [spike]. ~ Common: ; squiggle; {twiddle}; not Rare: approx; wiggle; swung dash; enyay [sqiggle (sic)]. The pronunciation of `#' as `pound' is common in the U.S. but a bad idea; {{Commonwealth Hackish}} has its own rather more apposite use of `pound sign' (confusingly, on British keyboards the pound graphic happens to replace `#'; thus Britishers sometimes call `#' on a U.S.-ASCII keyboard `pound', compounding the American error). The U.S. usage derives from an old-fashioned commercial practice of using a `#' suffix to tag pound weights on bills of lading. The character is usually pronounced `hash' outside the U.S. There are more culture wars over the correct pronunciation of this character than any other which has led to the {ha ha only serious} suggestion that it be pronounced `shibboleth' (see Judges 12:6 in an Old Testament or Tanakh). The `uparrow' name for circumflex and `leftarrow' name for underline are historical relics from archaic ASCII (the 1963 version), which had these graphics in those character positions rather than the modern punctuation characters. The `swung dash' or `approximation' sign is not quite the same as tilde in typeset material but the ASCII tilde serves for both (compare {angle brackets}). Some other common usages cause odd overlaps. The `#', `$', `>', and `&' characters, for example, are all pronounced hex" in different communities because various assemblers use them as a prefix tag for hexadecimal constants (in particular, `#' in many assembler-programming cultures, `$' in the 6502 world, `>' at Texas Instruments, and `&' on the BBC Micro, Sinclair, and some Z80 machines). See also {splat}. The inability of ASCII text to correctly represent any of the world's other major languages makes the designers' choice of 7 bits look more and more like a serious {misfeature} as the use of international networks continues to increase (see {software rot}). Hardware and software from the U.S. still tends to embody the assumption that ASCII is the universal character set and that characters have 7 bits; this is a major irritant to people who want to use a character set suited to their own languages. Perversely, though, efforts to solve this problem by proliferating `national' character sets produce an evolutionary pressure to use a _smaller_ subset common to all those in use From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (13 Mar 01) [foldoc]: ASCII {American Standard Code for Information Interchange} From V.E.R.A. -- Virtual Entity of Relevant Acronyms 13 March 2001 [vera]: ASCII American Standard Code of Information Interchange
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