ASCII??

Question

what's ascii really??

Answer 1

It's a character encoding, using 1 byte per character. Look up an ASCII table on the net for all the values.

Answer 2

American Standard Code for Information Interchange.

In plain speech, every letter has a code assigned to it. These were arranged in a code page and everyone agreed to use these codes to communicate using electricity, sound and light. Symbolic representation is old (like telegraph/Morse) and explains why weird codes in ASCII: ring a bell, end transmission, draw lines/blocks...etc.

In ASCII the number 65='A'. If you looked in a raw file containing the letter 'A', the byte will be a 65 (base 10) or it may be represented in hexadecimal; it's the same thing.

Edge of topic:
Typewriter influence (printers, computer screens) explains 'form feed' / 'line feed' / 'carriage return' to handle paper or output position. These are 'control codes' with no content awareness...and it's why 'Standard Code' matters. Not all hardware agreed to do the same things...so Apple Computer's treatment for the Home key (behaves as carriage return everywhere but Apple) can perplex coders.

More off topic:
As computers became international...with only 256 possible characters/codes...ASCII was far too limited to represent language; that's when new code pages, unicode and multiple-byte 'character sets' appeared.