FACT: Computers can only understand numbers.
Actually they understand only two numercial values 1 or 0 (One or Zero)
So,for Computers to communicate with Humans, we need to translate between binary numbers (the computer uses) and the letters & words that we humans use.
ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange.
It enables computers of different types in different countries to talk to each other.
Every character on keyboard is represented by a byte. (7 bits + a spare bit).
Every number (0 to 127) has a character to represent it. (see Table Left)
Most Computers in the world use ASCii
If you hold down the alt Key you can access these
eg Type in (alt 225) (alt 164) and (alt 130)
As computers can only understand numbers, an ASCII code is the numerical representation of a character such as 'a' or '@' or an action of some sort.
ASCII was developed a long time ago and now the non-printing characters are rarely used for their original purpose.
English has 26 letters in the Alphabet, but the Spainish Alphabet has 30 letters.
Many other languages have characters not found in the English alphabet.
Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, Malay, Ethiopean and many other languages have thousands of symbols that are not in the standard English alphabet. Chinese and Japanese have completely different characters.
You don't need to know these in detail. just that they exist and why
The Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code is a character set used by older Mainframe computers.
Unicode allows the characters from all these other languages as well as Mathematical symbols and many other characters not available in the standard ASCii character set.
ACCii Table with 128 values for the 7 bit Binary codes
Character Sets
d. explain the use of code to represent a character set (ASCII, EBCDIC and UNICODE);