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hackclub / some-assembly-required

📖 An approachable introduction to Assembly.
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Bytes & ASCII - incorrect info #94

Open abgros opened 3 weeks ago

abgros commented 3 weeks ago

Well, when we're representing a single character (like A), it takes 8 bits to represent that character in data.

ASCII is a 7-bit encoding (source). ASCII is basically obsolete and nowadays it makes more sense to refer to those characters as Basic Latin. Also, many computers historically have used byte sizes other than 8 (source).

Zaydiscool777 commented 2 weeks ago

I think the reason why it's called ASCII is because that's how it was referred to when the language was made. While it could be Basic Latin, ASCII shows that it was from null-|, and not anything else. Basic Latin makes it feel more like Unicode, and implies you can use non-ASCII characters as well.

Zaydiscool777 commented 2 weeks ago

ASCII is usually stored in 8 bits because it takes up 7 bits (although you can compress them to make it 7)