A character set that consists of the first 128 (from 0 through 127) ASCII characters. The values 0 through 31 are used for nonprinting control codes (see Appendix C), and the range 32 through 127 is used to represent the letters of the alphabet and common punctuation symbols. The entire set from 0 through 127 is referred to as the standard ASCII character set. All computers that use ASCII can understand the standard ASCII character set.
See also American Standard Code for Information Interchange; ASCII file; ASCII extended character set; double-byte character set; Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code; Unicode.