Glossary of technical terms

This is a collaborative glossary of technical terms to help students learn the language of technology.

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You can also make suggestions via Slack using the Workflow tab in #technical.

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ASCII

ASCII (short for American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a coding system which maps characters to numbers and vice versa. The numerical values range from 0 to 127, and 33 of these are control characters (originally specified for controlling printers and display devices), leaving just 95 for printable characters.

No accented characters or emojis are included - they are covered by more complex encodings such as Unicode - and, this being an American invention, the dollar sign ("$") is present but the pound sign ("£") is not.

For more information see Wikipedia.

CSV / Comma Separated Values

Added by Tom Lynch

This is a method of encoding tabular data in a machine-readable format using an agreed ASCII character to separate data columns, usually a comma, but sometimes tabs, and new lines as rows.

Typically, the choice of ASCII character is based on whether the data is likely to have that character in a cell; for example, a cell can't have a comma if the data is encoded with commas or without using an escape character.

This data:

Would be encoded like this:

Name,Age
Tom,36
Kyle,34