ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange)

ASCII, or American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard used to represent text in computers and other devices. It assigns a unique number to each character, including letters, digits, punctuation marks, and control symbols. For example, the letter 'A' is represented by the number 65. ASCII allows computers to communicate and understand text consistently, making it essential for programming, data processing, and file formats. Despite its age, ASCII remains fundamental in computer science, serving as a building block for more complex encoding systems.