Chapter 6.7, Problem 3QLQ

Explanation of Solution

ASCII characters:

In a computer system, characters can be represented using standard numeric codes. The most commonly used standard is referred as “American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII)”.

• ASCII is primarily based on the English alphabet for character encoding.
• It uses 128 unique characters; and seven bits to represent each character in the set. Check bit is used as the eighth bit to ensure proper data transmission.
• Extended ASCII character version includes the eighth bit and allows 256 unique characters, which includes some additional symbols and some accented letters.
• ASCII has a finite number of characters; so it lists them all and assigns binary string value to each one of them.
• However, some problems need to be addressed, such as, in English language, there are 26 letters, and ASCII considers uppercase, lowercase letters separately, and assigns a value for each of the 52 characters.
• ASCII character set as well as Unicode character set treats uppercase and lowercase letters distinctly.

Binary code:

The digital data can be symbolized, stored and communicated as a set of binary bits. This set is referred as binary code.

• The letters, special characters or digits are represented using the binary digits “0” and “1” in a computer device or other electronic devices...