Comparison of ASCII with other common character encodings:
1. ASCII vs ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1):
- ASCII: 128 characters (0-127)
- ISO-8859-1: 256 characters (0-255), extended Western European characters
- Relationship: First 128 characters of ISO-8859-1 are identical to ASCII
2. ASCII vs GB2312 (Chinese encoding):
- ASCII: Single byte, English only
- GB2312: Double byte, supports Simplified Chinese
- Compatibility: GB2312 is compatible with ASCII
3. ASCII vs Shift-JIS (Japanese encoding):
- ASCII: Single byte, English only
- Shift-JIS: 1-2 bytes, supports Japanese
- Compatibility: Shift-JIS is compatible with ASCII
4. ASCII vs EBCDIC:
- ASCII: 7-bit encoding, widely used
- EBCDIC: 8-bit encoding, mainly used in IBM mainframes
- Difference: Character mappings are completely different, not compatible
5. ASCII vs UTF-8:
- ASCII: Fixed 1 byte, 128 characters
- UTF-8: Variable 1-4 bytes, supports all Unicode characters
- Compatibility: UTF-8 is fully compatible with ASCII
6. ASCII vs UTF-16:
- ASCII: Fixed 1 byte
- UTF-16: 2 or 4 bytes
- Compatibility: UTF-16 is not compatible with ASCII
Selection Recommendations:
- Pure English environment: ASCII
- Western European languages: ISO-8859-1
- Chinese environment: GB2312/GBK/UTF-8
- International applications: UTF-8
- IBM systems: EBCDIC
Modern Trends:
- UTF-8 has become the internet standard
- ASCII continues to exist as a subset of Unicode
- Old encodings are gradually being phased out