ASCII assigns numbers to characters. 'A' is 65, 'a' is 97, '0' is 48. Computers store text as numbers, and ASCII is the mapping that makes it readable.

Why Should You Care?

Sometimes you need to convert characters to their ASCII values, or back again. Programming often involves this. It's also helpful for understanding how text encoding works.

ASCII is old but still foundational. Modern systems use Unicode (which includes ASCII), but the core concept remains the same.