54 lines
3.6 KiB
Plaintext
54 lines
3.6 KiB
Plaintext
ASCII
|
|
|
|
/askee/ , 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 . or 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. 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; bling; 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].
|