theantler:

It's not called ASCII because it's not an ASCII character. There's some history involved which makes the data type name a bit misleading. It's much like weight and mass in physics: A pound of mass weighs a pound of weight because we're on the surface of the earth. On the moon, the mass and weight are drastically different.

In early computer times, we would store a character in a byte. But even then, a character wasn't necessarily ASCII. If you write an 0x40 to most terminals, you'd get an "@" on the screen, because most terminals were ASCII. But if you wrote it to an EBCDIC terminal, you'd see a " " instead.

Think of it as an eight-bit signed integer rather than a graphic symbol.

...roboticus

In reply to Re: Datatype and pack/unpack by roboticus
in thread Datatype and pack/unpack by theantler

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