The ASCII Code
ASCII stands for "American
Standard Code for Information Interchange" and
is used to both to store text (character) data into computers, and to retrieve
it back out.
ASCII assigns
a unique number to each letter of the alphabet
and to each symbol, such as the “@” or “*”
or punctuation mark, such as the comma, period, exclamation mark, question
mark, etc.
This allows
computers to exchange data in a more efficient, numeric way
with other computer that also use the same ASCII code to
retrieve the data that they receive.
NOTE :
Another coding system used
on mainframe computers is the “EBCDIC” code.
This is the acronym for :
Extended
Binary
Coded
Decimal
Interchange
Code
This code performs basically the same function as
ASCII,
but uses different numeric values for each character.
The EBCDIC code primarily conformed to the original
“punched card” formats.