[scarface74]

Why would you expect the modern application developer to even know what ASCII is?

There is a chance I wouldn’t know what ASCII encoding was if my exposure to programming didn’t start in the 8 bit era. C is foreign to a lot of self taught programmers.

[Kaveren]

A modern application developer should be at least vaguely familiar with Unicode, so character encodings should not be an entirely foreign concept.

You should be able to use a search engine to figure out what ASCII is, though. That's fair game to expect. The text document mentions ASCII, so it's not like a developer would be left without a clue.

[Shorel]

In this modern time, no one needs to know what the ASCII code for @ is, but I think it is logical to expect people to know that some encoding exists and that letters can be mapped to numbers.

Also, all the ASCII you need to know to solve the problem is explained at length in the problem description.

[jniedrauer]

I couldn't tell you offhand how to convert between an int and an ASCII character.

...But if you give me a second...

Now that I've typed "ascii character codes" into google, I can tell you how to convert between an int and a character.

You don't have to memorize everything. Well over half of our job is knowing how to find information quickly.

[swebs]

Remember the context, this is an introduction to computer science course. The slides for the lecture for that week most likely explained everything you need to know to solve the problem.

Even completely ignoring ASCII, it is trivial to create a dictionary mapping integers to characters.

[thrower123]

ASCII does still map to the most commonly used parts of Unicode, so there is that. I would agree that I wouldn't have the foggiest idea what most of the ASCII character codes are if I hadn't cut my teeth on archaic stuff like QBasic; I remember a lot of silly little toy assignments doing rot13 or manually upper and lowercasing strings. But they do come up from time to time when you get into, for instance, JS keydown/keyup events. But any competently designed modern API ought to at least have named constants for this kind of crap

[scarface74]

Don’t ask me why I remember that the lazy non performant way to put a character on the screen in assembly was to store the ASCII number in the A register and

JSR $FDED

The fast way was to copy the bytes directly to the $400-$7FF address space and figure out the non contiguous memory map -> screen yourself.

[exikyut]

(After a "...I never used that in QBasic!", google explained that this is for the 6502)

[namibj]

I'm right now trying ti get around being made to learn ASCII for vocational school (some certification is useful to pass automated recruiters).

I base my Opinion on it being a bad idea to rely on manual translation, and untill then I'll have learned to write code that does the translation for me.