ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange)
ASCII is a standard encoding system used to represent text characters in computer systems. Developed in the 1960s, ASCII assigns a unique 7-bit binary number to each character, allowing for the representation of up to 128 characters. These characters include uppercase and lowercase English letters, digits, punctuation marks, and control codes (e.g., newline and tab). ASCII was widely adopted because it provided a universal way to encode text across different systems, enabling interoperability. Although it has been largely replaced by more comprehensive encoding standards like Unicode, ASCII remains fundamental in programming, especially for basic text processing tasks.
Text
Text refers to sequences of characters that convey readable information to humans. In computing, text is represented using encoding systems like ASCII or Unicode, which map each character to a numeric value. Text data is widely used in applications ranging from simple documents and communication to complex programming and data processing. The flexibility of text as a medium for communication makes it a fundamental part of human-computer interaction. Modern systems often rely on Unicode because it supports a vast range of characters from different languages and symbols, enabling global communication.