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suggestion that it be pronounced 'shibboleth' (see Judges 12.6 in a Christian Bible). |
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The 'uparrow' name for circumflex and 'leftarrow' name for underline are historical relics from archaic ASCII (the 1963 version), which had these graphics in those character positions rather than the modern punctuation characters. |
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The 'swung dash' or 'approximation' sign is not quite the same as tilde in typeset material (it looks like this: ~) but the ASCII tilde serves for both (compare angle brackets). |
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Some other common usages cause odd overlaps. The '#', '$', '>', and '&' characters, for example, are all pronounced "hex" in different communities because various assemblers use them as a prefix tag for hexadecimal constants (in particular, '#' in many assembler-programming cultures, '$' in the 6502 world, '>' at Texas Instruments, and '&' on the BBC Micro, Sinclair, and some Z80 machines). See also splat. |
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The inability of ASCII text to correctly represent any of the world's other major languages makes the designers' choice of 7 bits look more and more like a serious misfeature as the use of international networks continues to increase (see software rot). Hardware and software from the U.S. still tends to embody the assumption that ASCII is the universal character set and that characters have 7 bits; this is a major irritant to people who want to use a character set suited to their own languages. Perversely, though, efforts to solve this problem by proliferating 'national' character sets produce an evolutionary pressure to use a smaller subset common to all those in use. |
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ASCII art n. The fine art of drawing diagrams using the ASCII character set (mainly '|', '-', '/', '\', and '+'). Also known as character graphics or ASCII graphics; see also boxology. Here is a serious example: |
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A power supply consisting of a full wave rectifier circuit
feeding a capacitor input filter circuit |
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