[conlang_learners] ASCII and alt codes

[Jim Henry]

2009/7/15 Dayle Hill <dwhmusic32 at yahoo.co.uk>:
> Could someone explain to me in layman's terms what exactly ASCII is please?
> Is it simply typing without the use of diacritics or special characters?

In layman's terms, the short answer is yes.

ASCII is a seven-bit character set that's common to pretty nearly all
computers and operating systems these days.  It has some control
characters, of which only tab and the line break characters are used
widely nowadays as far as I know, and also 96 printable characters,
which include the 52 unaccented capital and lowercase letters of the
Latin alphabet as used by American English (not British English, or it
would have included some diareses and ligatures that are absent), the
ten digits, and a number of punctuation marks.

If you use Windows charmap, the first four and a half rows of
characters (up to the tilde ~, the highest printable ASCII character)
are the ASCII printable set.

The next 128 characters after that, in Unicode, are the Latin-1
character set, which has a few additional punctuation marks plus the
accented characters used by the majority of WEstern European
languages; the highest Latin-1 character is 'ÿ' (y with diaresis).
After that you have characters that require UTF-8 or other Unicode
support to type and display, or else a setting on your computer that
puts the particular characters you want into the space otherwise
occupied by Latin-1 (the latter solution was common in the 80s and 90s
for Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew etc. but is rarely used now as far as I
know).

-- 
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/