ASCII in the context of "Character (computing)"

The Arabic chat alphabet, also known as Arabizi, Arabeezi, Arabish, Franco-Arabic or simply Franco (from French: franco-arabe) refer to the romanized alphabets for informal Arabic dialects in which Arabic script is transcribed or encoded into a combination of Latin script and Western Arabic numerals. These informal chat alphabets were originally used primarily by youth in the Arab world in very informal settings—especially for communicating over the Internet or for sending messages via cellular phones—though use is not necessarily restricted by age anymore and these chat alphabets have been used in other media such as advertising.

These chat alphabets differ from more formal and academic Arabic transliteration systems, in that they use numerals and multigraphs instead of diacritics for letters such as ṭāʾ (ط) or ḍād (ض) that do not exist in the basic Latin script (ASCII), and in that what is being transcribed is an informal dialect and not Standard Arabic. These Arabic chat alphabets also differ from each other, as each is influenced by the particular phonology of the Arabic dialect being transcribed and the orthography of the dominant European language in the area—typically the language of the former colonists, and typically either French or English.

The equals sign (British English) or equal sign (American English), also known as the equality sign, is the mathematical symbol =, which is used to indicate equality. In an equation it is placed between two expressions that have the same value, or for which one studies the conditions under which they have the same value.

In Unicode and ASCII it has the code point U+003D. It was invented in 1557 by the Welsh mathematician Robert Recorde.

Character encoding is a convention of using a numeric value to represent each character of a writing script. Not only can a character set include natural language symbols, but it can also include codes that have meanings or functions outside of language, such as control characters and whitespace. Character encodings have also been defined for some constructed languages. When encoded, character data can be stored, transmitted, and transformed by a computer. The numerical values that make up a character encoding are known as code points and collectively comprise a code space or a code page.

Early character encodings that originated with optical or electrical telegraphy and in early computers could only represent a subset of the characters used in languages, sometimes restricted to upper case letters, numerals and limited punctuation. Over time, encodings capable of representing more characters were created, such as ASCII, ISO/IEC 8859, and Unicode encodings such as UTF-8 and UTF-16.

Romanisation of Bengali is the representation of written Bengali in the Latin script. Various romanisation systems for Bengali are used, most of which do not perfectly represent Bengali phonology. While different standards for romanisation have been proposed for Bengali, none has been adopted with the same degree of uniformity as Japanese or Sanskrit.

The Bengali script has been included with the group of Indic scripts whose romanisation does not represent the phonetic value of Bengali. Some of them are the "International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration" or IAST system (based on diacritics), "Indian languages Transliteration" or ITRANS (uses upper case alphabets suited for ASCII keyboards), and the National Library at Calcutta romanisation.

In computing, a human-readable medium or human-readable format is any encoding of data or information that can be naturally read by humans, resulting in human-readable data. It is often encoded as ASCII or Unicode text, rather than as binary data.

In most contexts, the alternative to a human-readable representation is a machine-readable format or medium of data primarily designed for reading by electronic, mechanical or optical devices, or computers. For example, Universal Product Code (UPC) barcodes are very difficult to read for humans, but very effective and reliable with the proper equipment, whereas the strings of numerals that commonly accompany the label are the human-readable form of the barcode information. Since any type of data encoding can be parsed by a suitably programmed computer, the decision to use binary encoding rather than text encoding is usually made to conserve storage space. Encoding data in a binary format typically requires fewer bytes of storage and increases efficiency of access (input and output) by eliminating format parsing or conversion.

A binary code is the value of a data-encoding convention represented in a binary notation that usually is a sequence of 0s and 1s; sometimes called a bit string. For example, ASCII is an 8-bit text encoding that in addition to the human readable form (letters) can be represented as binary. Binary code can also refer to the mass noun code that is not human readable in nature such as machine code and bytecode.

Even though all modern computer data is binary in nature, and therefore can be represented as binary, other numerical bases may be used. Power of 2 bases (including hex and octal) are sometimes considered binary code since their power-of-2 nature makes them inherently linked to binary. Decimal is, of course, a commonly used representation. For example, ASCII characters are often represented as either decimal or hex. Some types of data such as image data is sometimes represented as hex, but rarely as decimal.

A smiley, also known as a smiley face, is a basic ideogram representing a smiling face. Since the 1950s, it has become part of popular culture worldwide, used either as a standalone ideogram or as a form of communication, such as emoticons. The smiley began as two dots and a line representing eyes and a mouth. More elaborate designs emerged in the 1950s, featuring noses, eyebrows, and outlines. New York radio station WMCA used a yellow and black design for its "Good Guys!" campaign in the early 1960s. More yellow-and-black designs appeared in the 1960s and 1970s, including works by Harvey Ross Ball in 1963, and Franklin Loufrani in 1971. The Smiley Company, founded by Franklin Loufrani, claims to hold the rights to a version of the smiley face in over 100 countries. It has become one of the top 100 licensing companies globally.

There was a "smile face" fad in 1971 in the United States. The Associated Press (AP) ran a wirephoto showing Joy P. Young and Harvey Ball holding the design of the smiley and reported on September 11, 1971, that "two affiliated insurance companies" claimed credit for the symbol and Harvey Ball designed it; Bernard and Murray Spain claimed credit for introducing it to the market. This referred to the Worcester Mutual Fire Insurance Company of America and the Guarantee Mutual Assurance Company of America, whose 1963 "Smile Power" campaign first distributed smiley buttons to employees. In October 1971, Loufrani trademarked his design in France while working as a journalist for the French newspaper France-Soir.Today, the smiley face has evolved from an ideogram into a template for communication and use in written language. The internet smiley originated with Scott Fahlman in the 1980s, when he first theorized that ASCII characters could be used to create faces and convey emotions in text. Since then, Fahlman's designs have become digital pictograms known as emoticons. They are loosely based on the ideograms designed in the 1960s and 1970s, continuing with the yellow and black design.