What is ASCII?
ASCII is well-known as the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Digital computers utilize an alphanumeric code called ASCII for data transfer. A 7-bit code called ASCII can represent either 27 or 128 distinct characters. The three-bit group that makes up the ASCII code is followed by a four-bit code.
The character encoding used for telegraph data is the foundation of ASCII encoding. It was originally released as a computing standard by the American National Standards Institute in 1963. The uppercase and lowercase letters A through Z, the digits 0 through 9, and the fundamental punctuation symbols are among the characters in ASCII encoding. Additionally, several control characters that were meant to be used with teletype printing terminals are used, even though they don’t print.
Advantages of ASCII
Below are some advantages of ASCII
- ASCII is easy to use and suitable across most platforms.
- The character codes for numbers and characters are ideally suited to text manipulation programming techniques and the use of numbers as raw data for calculations.
- To store all alphanumeric characters, ASCII coding uses the English language. With only 256 characters, ASCII coding requires less storage space.
Disadvantages of ASCII
Below are some disadvantages of ASCII
- Ineffective encoding of characters. When encoding numerical and English language data, standard ASCII encoding is effective.
- Different coding systems demand different techniques for conversion.
- All that is used in ASCII code is English. If a document is written in a different coding than ASCII, it cannot read it and will simply display characters in place of the text.
Difference Between ASCII and EBCDIC
ASCII and EBCDIC are the most widely used character coding system. Eight-bit character encoding called Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code is primarily utilized by IBM mainframe and midrange computer operating systems.