transcription, транскрипция: [ /as'kee/ n. ]
[originally an acronym (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) but now merely conventional] The predominant character set encoding of present-day computers. The standard version uses 7 bits for each character, whereas most earlier codes (including early drafts of of ASCII prior to June 1961) used fewer. This change allowed the inclusion of lowercase letters -- a major win -- but it did not provide for accented letters or any other letterforms not used in English (such as the German sharp-S or the ae-ligature which is a letter in, for example, Norwegian). It could be worse, though. It could be much worse. See EBCDIC to understand how. A history of ASCII and its ancestors is at http://www.wps.com/texts/codes/index.html .
Computers are much pickier and less flexible about spelling than humans; thus, hackers need to be very precise when talking about characters, and have developed a considerable amount of verbal shorthand for them. Every character has one or more names -- some formal, some concise, some silly. Common jargon names for ASCII characters are collected here. See also individual entries for bang , excl , open , ques , semi , shriek , splat , twiddle , and Yu-Shiang Whole Fish .
This list derives from revision 2.3 of the Usenet ASCII pronunciation guide. Single characters are listed in ASCII order; character pairs are sorted in by first member. For each character, common names are given in rough order of popularity, followed by names that are reported but rarely seen; official ANSI/CCITT names are surrounded by brokets: <>. Square brackets mark the particularly silly names introduced by INTERCAL . The abbreviations "l/r" and "o/c" stand for left/right and "open/close" respectively. Ordinary parentheticals provide some usage information.!Common: bang ; pling; excl; shriek; <exclamation mark>. Rare:factorial; exclam; smash; cuss; boing; yell; wow; hey; wham; eureka;[spark-spot]; soldier, control.
"Common: double quote; quote. Rare: literal mark; double-glitch;<quotation marks> <dieresis> dirk; [rabbit-ears]; doubleprime.
#Common: number sign; pound; pound sign; hash; sharp; crunch ; hex;[mesh]. Rare: grid; crosshatch; octothorpe; flash; <square>, pig-pen;tictactoe; scratchmark; thud; thump; splat .
$Common: dollar; <dollar sign>. Rare: currency symbol; buck; cash;string (from BASIC); escape (when used as the echo of ASCII ESC);ding; cache; [big money].
%Common: percent; <percent sign> mod; grapes. Rare:[double-oh-seven].
&Common: <ampersand> amper; and. Rare: address (from C); reference(from C++); andpersand; bitand; background (from sh(1));pretzel; amp. [INTERCAL called this `ampersand'; what could besillier?]
Abriged! For full definition refer to original Jargon File http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/