ASCII

1. Acronym for American Standards Code for Information Interchange. Often used to describe the ordered set of internal codes which a computer uses to represent characters. This set includes both printable and non-printable characters. Appendix A of the INFORMIX-4GL Reference manual contains a list of the ASCII character set.

See also control character, escape character, printable character.

2. An ASCII file is one containing ASCII characters as opposed to binary information. An ASCII file is readable in a text editor. 4GL source modules and form specification files are examples of ASCII files.

See also form specification file, source module, text editor.