How are characters represented using ASCII codes in computer systems?

Characters are represented in computer systems using ASCII codes by assigning a unique number to each character.

ASCII, which stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard used to represent text in computers and other devices that use text. Each character is assigned a unique number between 0 and 127, which corresponds to a specific character. For example, the ASCII code for the capital letter 'A' is 65, while the lowercase 'a' is 97.

The ASCII standard was originally developed from telegraphic codes. It was first published in 1963 by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and has been revised several times since then. The standard includes definitions for 128 characters: 33 are non-printing control characters (many of which are obsolete) that affect how text is processed and 95 are printable characters.

The ASCII codes help in the transmission of data between computers, as they can be used to represent all necessary punctuation and control characters (like the carriage return and line feed), as well as all the letters and numbers. This makes ASCII a very useful tool in the world of computing.

The ASCII system is based on the English alphabet and includes all the characters you would find on a standard keyboard. However, it does not include special characters from non-English languages. This limitation led to the development of other character encoding schemes, such as Unicode, which can represent characters from many different languages and scripts.

In a computer, the ASCII codes are stored as binary numbers. For example, the ASCII code for 'A' (which is 65) would be stored as the 8-bit binary number 01000001. This binary representation is used in the underlying hardware of the computer system.

In conclusion, ASCII codes provide a standard way to represent characters in computer systems, making it possible to store and transmit text data reliably and efficiently. Despite its limitations, ASCII remains widely used and forms the basis for more advanced character encoding schemes.