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ASCII stands for "American Standard Code for Information Interchange." It is a character encoding standard originally developed in the early 1960s by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to facilitate the exchange of text-based information between different computer systems and devices. ASCII assigns a unique numerical value, or code point, to each printable and non-printable character, including letters, numbers, punctuation marks, symbols, and control characters. The ASCII standard uses 7-bit binary code to represent a total of 128 characters, with each character encoded using a specific combination of binary digits. Printable characters, such as letters and numbers, are represented by their corresponding ASCII codes, allowing computers to store, transmit, and display text data using a standardized format. ASCII has become the de facto character encoding standard for most modern computing systems and programming languages, serving as the foundation for text processing, communication protocols, file formats, and user interface design. While ASCII was originally developed for the English language, it has been extended and adapted to support other languages and writing systems through various character encoding schemes, such as ISO 8859 and Unicode. Despite the emergence of more advanced character encoding standards, ASCII remains widely used and recognized for its simplicity, compatibility, and versatility in representing text data across different computing platforms and environments.