American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), also known as ANSI X3.4, and Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC) are computer character encoding sets. While there are a number of variants of ASCII, they are all essentially the same, and the encoding system is often praised by computer scientists for its simplicity and adaptability. EBCDIC is considered an anachronism in the computing world as it was designed for the now obsolete punched cards. ASCII, on the other hand, was developed in the 1960s and is largely designed for use in the modern computing world.
The ASCII coding system is known for its adaptability and simplicity.
Both ASCII and EBCDIC are based on Baudot code, an alternative Morse code from the 19th century, but they were designed for different purposes and purposes. Essentially a seven-bit code, ASCII allows for the eighth most significant bit (MSB) for error checking, but most contemporary computing systems use codes greater than 128 for extended character sets. While this is a character encoding set common to many different computer systems, EBCDIC is a character set specific to IBM mainframes.
EBCDIC uses the eight available bit quota and therefore does not need parity checking, but has a wider range of check characters. However, the advantages of this character encoding set are limited to this broader scope of control characters and the suitability of EBCDIC for use on punched cards. It also includes the US cent character (¢) which ASCII ignores, although it normally ignores these other characters: [] {} ^ ~ and ¦.
Some of the characters missing from EBCDIC and found in ASCII are in the UU encoding range, with the consequence that Internet mail attachments are often corrupted. Also, there are many variants of EBCDIC and among these variants there are types that are incompatible with each other. This problem is compounded because documentation for this character set is difficult to obtain from IBM, unlike ASCII, which is well documented and widely available.
There is software that allows users to convert between the two sets. However, it seems only a matter of time before ASCII’s status as a de facto encoding system becomes de jure among computer users.
