Link: Four Column ASCII

February 2, 2017

Four Column ASCII (via) is a reformatted version of this Hacker News comment that presents the ASCII chart in four columns of 32 characters instead of the usual presentation of eight columns of 16 (as seen eg here). A four column representation makes a number of patterns in ASCII (both bit-wise and otherwise) much clearer, for example why Ctrl-Space, Ctrl-@, and Ctrl-` all generally generate a null byte.

(I suspect that ASCII is traditionally presented in an 8 column by 16 row table because that fits into an 80x24 terminal or terminal window.)


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By Dan Strychalski at 2021-09-24 02:59:51:

[Quote] I suspect that ASCII is traditionally presented in an 8 column by 16 row table because that fits into an 80x24 terminal or terminal window. [Unquote]

Eight by sixteen is the format used in the ASA/ANSI docs.

Column/row notation based on that format is also used extensively in those and other docs.

I don't mean to knock 4x32 format. Anything that aids understanding of ASCII seems OK to me (though ISO's rearrangement into rows-first, columns-second format seems... unhelpful).

Regards,

Dan Strychalski

Hsinchu, Taiwan R.O.C.

Written on 02 February 2017.
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Last modified: Thu Feb 2 19:45:41 2017
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