Extended ASCII - Usage in Computer Readable Languages

Usage in Computer Readable Languages

For programming languages and document languages such as C and HTML, the principle of Extended ASCII is important, since it enables many different encodings and therefore many human languages to be supported with little extra programming effort in the software that interprets the computer readable language files.

The principle of Extended ASCII means that:

  • all ASCII bytes (0x00 to 0x7F) have the same meaning in all variants of extended ASCII,
  • bytes that are not ASCII bytes are used only for free text, not for tags, keywords and other features having special meaning to the interpreting software.

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