from
The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48
Ascii \As"ci*i\, Ascians \As"cians\, n. pl. [L. ascii, pl. of
ascius, Gr. ? without shadow; 'a priv. + ? shadow.]
Persons who, at certain times of the year, have no shadow at
noon; -- applied to the inhabitants of the torrid zone, who
have, twice a year, a vertical sun.
[1913 Webster]
from
Jargon File (4.4.4, 14 Aug 2003)
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 ae 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.
! Common: {bang} ; pling; excl; not; shriek; ball-bat; <exclamation
mark>. Rare: factorial; exclam; smash; cuss; boing; yell; wow; hey;
wham; eureka; [spark-spot]; soldier, control.
" Common: double quote; quote. Rare: literal mark; double-glitch;
snakebite; <quotation marks>; <dieresis>; dirk; [rabbit-ears]; double
prime.
# Common: number sign; pound; pound sign; hash; sharp; {crunch} ; hex;
[mesh]. Rare: grid; crosshatch; octothorpe; flash; <square>, pig-pen;
tictactoe; scratchmark; thud; thump; {splat} .
$ Common: dollar; <dollar sign>. Rare: currency symbol; buck; cash;
string (from BASIC); escape (when used as the echo of ASCII ESC);
ding; cache; [big money].
% Common: percent; <percent sign>; mod; grapes. Rare:
[double-oh-seven].
& Common: <ampersand>; amp; amper; and, and sign. Rare: address (from
C); reference (from C++); andpersand; bitand; background (from sh(1)
); pretzel. [INTERCAL called this ampersand ; what could be sillier?]
' Common: single quote; quote; <apostrophe>. Rare: prime; glitch;
tick; irk; pop; [spark]; <closing single quotation mark>; <acute
accent>.
( ) Common: l/r paren; l/r parenthesis; left/right; open/close;
paren/thesis; o/c paren; o/c parenthesis; l/r parenthesis; l/r banana.
Rare: so/already; lparen/rparen; <opening/closing parenthesis>; o/c
round bracket, l/r round bracket, [wax/wane];
parenthisey/unparenthisey; l/r ear.
* Common: star; [ {splat} ]; <asterisk>. Rare: wildcard; gear; dingle;
mult; spider; aster; times; twinkle; glob (see {glob} ); {Nathan Hale}
.
+ Common: <plus>; add. Rare: cross; [intersection].
, Common: <comma>. Rare: <cedilla>; [tail].
- Common: dash; <hyphen>; <minus>. Rare: [worm]; option; dak;
bithorpe.
. Common: dot; point; <period>; <decimal point>. Rare: radix point;
full stop; [spot].
/ Common: slash; stroke; <slant>; forward slash. Rare: diagonal;
solidus; over; slak; virgule; [slat].
from
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (8 July 2008)
American Standard Code for Information Interchange
ASCII
The basis of character sets used in almost all present-day
computers. {US-ASCII} uses only the lower seven {bits}
({character points} 0 to 127) to convey some {control codes},
space, numbers, most basic punctuation, and unaccented letters
a-z and A-Z. More modern coded character sets (e.g.,
{Latin-1}, {Unicode}) define extensions to ASCII for values
above 127 for conveying special Latin characters (like
accented characters, or German ess-tsett), characters from
non-Latin writing systems (e.g., Cyrillic, or {Han
characters}), and such desirable {glyphs} as distinct open-
and close-quotation marks. ASCII replaced earlier systems
such as {EBCDIC} and {Baudot}, which used fewer bytes, but
were each {broken} in their own way.
Computers are much pickier 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.
Individual characters are listed in this dictionary with
alternative names from revision 2.3 of the {Usenet} ASCII
pronunciation guide in rough order of popularity, including
their official {ITU-T} names and the particularly silly names
introduced by {INTERCAL}.
See {V} {ampersand}, {asterisk}, {back quote}, {backslash},
{caret}, {colon}, {comma}, {commercial at}, {control-C},
{dollar}, {dot}, {double quote}, {equals}, {exclamation mark},
{greater than}, {hash}, {left bracket}, {left parenthesis},
{less than}, {minus}, {parentheses}, {oblique stroke},
{percent}, {plus}, {question mark}, {right brace}, {right
brace}, {right bracket}, {right parenthesis}, {semicolon},
{single quote}, {space}, {tilde}, {underscore}, {vertical
bar}, {zero}.
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},
{Acorn Archimedes}, {Sinclair}, and some {Zilog Z80}
machines). See also {splat}.
The inability of {US-ASCII} to correctly represent nearly any
language other than English became an obvious and intolerable
{misfeature} as computer use outside the US and UK became the
rule rather than the exception (see {software rot}). And so
national extensions to US-ASCII were developed, such as
Latin-1.
Hardware and software from the US still tends to embody the
assumption that US-ASCII is the universal character set and
that words of text consist entirely of byte values 65-90 and
97-122 (A-Z and a-z); 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 sets of national characters produced an
evolutionary pressure (especially in protocol design, e.g.,
the {URL} standard) to stick to {US-ASCII} as a subset common
to all those in use, and therefore to stick to English as the
language encodable with the common subset of all the ASCII
dialects. This basic problem with having a multiplicity of
national character sets ended up being a prime justification
for {Unicode}, which was designed, ostensibly, to be the *one*
ASCII extension anyone will need.
A system is described as "{eight-bit clean}" if it doesn't
mangle text with byte values above 127, as some older systems
did.
See also {ASCII character table}, {Yu-Shiang Whole Fish}.
(1995-03-06)