I am writing an article on Unicode and discussing the advantages of this encoding scheme over outdated methods like ASCII.
As part of my research I am looking for a reference that listed the languages that could be fully represented using only the characters supported by ASCII. Haven't had much luck tracking it down with Google and I thought I'd tap the collective knowledge of SO to see if anyone had a reasonable list.
The ASCII character set is a 7-bit set of codes that allows 128 different characters. That is enough for every upper-case letter, lower-case letter, digit and punctuation mark on most keyboards. ASCII is only used for the English language.
Limitation of ASCII The 128 or 256 character limits of ASCII and Extended ASCII limits the number of character sets that can be held. Representing the character sets for several different language structures is not possible in ASCII, there are just not enough available characters.
The American National Standards Institute first published it as a standard for computing in 1963. Characters in ASCII encoding include upper- and lowercase letters A through Z, numerals 0 through 9 and basic punctuation symbols.
Java actually uses Unicode, which includes ASCII and other characters from languages around the world.
IIRC from my Latin classes, the macrons in Latin are later additions by people studying meters in Latin poetry; they wouldn't have been used in every-day writing. So you've got Latin.
There are no natural languages that I know of that can be fully represented in ASCII. Even American English, the language for which ASCII was invented, doesn't work: for one, there are a lot of foreign words that have been integrated into the American English language that cannot be represented in ASCII, like resumé, naïve or a word that probably every programmer uses regularly, schönfinkeln.
And two, ASCII is missing pretty much all typographic characters like “quotation marks”, dashes of various lengths (– and —), ellipses (…), thin and wide spaces and so on, all of which are used in American English.
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