Representation of Text

Question 1

What is ASCII?

Answer 1

ASCII, American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a code which is used in computers to represent letters, numbers and symbols/characters on computer and communication systems. It is 7 bit. It was set up in 1963 and a newer version was published in 1986.

Question 2

How is the binary of uppercase and lower case ASCII characters different?

Answer 2

The 6th bit I.e: second most significant bit is a 0 in uppercase and 1 in lower case.

Question 3

What is extended ASCII?

Answer 3

It is an 8 bit code which gives us additional 128 codes for use of non English alphabets and other graphical characters.

Question 4

What is the main disadvantage of ASCII?

Answer 4

ASCII can only represent characters of the western languages

Question 5

What is Unicode?

Answer 5

Unicode is the solution to ASCII’s problem. It can represent all languages around the world. Unicode can support upto four bytes per character. The initial 128 characters are the same as ASCII but after that there are several thousand characters.

Question 6

What were the goals with which Unicode was published based on?

Answer 6

1. To create a universal standard thay covers all languages and writing systems.
2. To produce a more efficient coding system than ASCII
3. To adopt a uniform encoding where each character is encoded as 16 or 32 bit code.
4. To create unambiguous encoding where each 16 and 32 bit value represents the same character.
5. To reserve part of the code for private use so user can assign their own characters and symbols.