ASCII
[American Standard Code for Information Interchange]
/as'kee/ n. The predominant character set encoding of present-day
computers. Uses 7 bits for each character, whereas most earlier
codes (including an early version of ASCII) 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
and the ae-ligature
which is a letter in, for example, Norwegian). It could be worse,
though. It could be much worse. See
{EBCDIC} to understand how.
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. Ordinary
parentheticals provide some usage information.
!
Common
bang; pling; excl; shriek;
.
Rare factorial; exclam; smash; cuss; boing; yell; wow; hey;
wham; eureka; [spark-spot]; soldier.
"
Common double quote; quote. Rare literal mark;
double-glitch; ; ; dirk;
[rabbit-ears]; double prime.
#
Common
