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The Elegance of the ASCII Table
ASCII, a standard whose legacy defines to this day how most of the letters and numbers in your computer get encoded into ones and zeroes, is elegant and beautiful. Via lessons in computer history, punched tape, and typewriters, I'd love to share some of its logic with you.
32 is a power of two, which means that you’d rightly expect these control codes to mathematically share a particular “pattern” in their binary representation with one another, distinct from the rest of the table. If you’re using this post as a way to teach yourself to “read” binary-formatted ASCII in your head, the rule to take away here is: if it begins 011, treat the remainder as a binary representation of an actual number. Bonus fun fact: early mechanical typewriters omitted a number 1: it was expected that you’d use the letter I. That’s fine for printed work, but not much help for computer-readable data.
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