-B VT ESC + ; K [ k {
-C FF FS , L \ l |
-D CR GS - M ] m }
-E SO RS . N ^ n ~
-F SI US / ? O _ o DEL
Figure 2-1. The ASCII character set.
There are a lot of good things you can say about ASCII. The 26 letter codes are contiguous, for example. (This is
not the case with EBCDIC.) Uppercase letters can be converted to lowercase and back by flipping one bit. The
codes for the 10 digits are easily derived from the value of the digits. (In BCDIC, the code for the character "0"
followed the code for the character "9"!)
Best of all, ASCII is a very dependable standard. No other standard is as prevalent or as ingrained in our keyboards,
video displays, system hardware, printers, font files, operating systems, and the Internet.
The World Beyond
The big problem with ASCII is indicated by the first word of the acronym. ASCII is truly an American standard, and
it isn't even good enough for other countries where English is spoken. Where is the British pound symbol ( ), for
instance?
English uses the Latin (or Roman) alphabet. Among written languages that use the Latin alphabet, English is unusual in
that very few words require letters with accent marks (or "diacritics"). Even for those English words where diacritics
are traditionally proper, such as coöperate or résumé, the spellings without diacritics are perfectly acceptable.
But north and south of the United States and across the Atlantic are many countries and languages where diacritics
are much more common. These accent marks originally aided in adopting the Latin alphabet to the differences in
spoken sounds among these languages. Journey farther east or south of Western Europe, and you'll encounter
languages that don't use the Latin alphabet at all, such as Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Russian (which uses the
Cyrillic alphabet). And if you travel even farther east, you'll discover the ideographic Han characters of Chinese,
which were also adopted in Japan and Korea.
The history of ASCII since 1967 is mostly a history of attempts to overcome its limitations and make it more
applicable to languages other than American English. In 1967, for example, the International Standards Organization
(ISO) recommended a variant of ASCII with codes 0x40, 0x5B, 0x5C, 0x5D, 0x7B, 0x7C, and 0x7D "reserved
for national use" and codes 0x5E, 0x60, and 0x7E labeled as "may be used for other graphical symbols when it is
necessary to have 8, 9, or 10 positions for national use." This is obviously not the best solution to internationalization
because there's no guarantee of consistency. But it indicates how desperate people were to successfully code
symbols necessary to various languages.
Extending ASCII
By the time the early small computers were being developed, the 8-bit byte had been firmly established. Thus, if a
byte were used to store characters, 128 additional characters could be invented to supplement ASCII. When the
original IBM PC was introduced in 1981, the video adapters included a ROM-based character set of 256
characters, which in itself was to become an important part of the IBM standard.
The original IBM extended character set included some accented characters and a lowercase Greek alphabet (useful
for mathematics notation), as well as some block-drawing and line-drawing characters. Additional characters were
also assigned to the code positions of the ASCII control characters, because the bulk of these control characters
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