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The Jargon File, version 4.4.8 (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 ß. or the ae-ligature æ
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.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 £ 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.

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