American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII)

ASCII is standard to encoding text character symbols as binary data for electronic communication. Each character is mapped to a 7-bit code, allowing for 127 characters total ( $1111111_{2} = 124_{10}$ ). The numerical order of these codes is known as ASCIIbetical order.

The first 32 codes are reserved as control characters, such as backspace and linefeed. However, the character for Delete is the 127th code for historic reasons. The remaining codes are reserved for printable characters including punctuation, symbols, numbers, and letters.