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> but out of the box it can’t. Even if such a device needs to be used, decoding ascii is a trivial lookup operation, not remotely comparable to decoding some arcane binary format, or a convoluted XML-derived format such as they are used in WYSIWYG editor formats. Yes, text relies on an encoding standard. So do numbers btw. (big/little endian, 2s/1s complement, sign/magnitude, floating-point representations), element enumeration (0 vs 1 based indexing) and even boolean logic (eg.: 0 is true in bash, everything else is false) At the end of the day, computers represent only 2 states: On and Off. Everything beyond that, needs an encoding. And some of these encodings are, at this point, both so universal and simple, that they can be considered as much a standard of the IT world, as 0 and 1. ASCII is one of those. |