Glossary of technical terms

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

Any CCI staff member or student can edit this page. Please follow the format others have given.

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:

Name	Age
Tom	36
Kyle	34

Would be encoded like this:

Name,Age
Tom,36
Kyle,34