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I heard someone describe the ASCII table as a state machine. Guess I could understand that as a state machine needed to parse it? This is surprisingly hard to s
by th0ma5 2y ago
I heard someone describe the ASCII table as a state machine. Guess I could understand that as a state machine needed to parse it? This is surprisingly hard to search for but I was wondering if anyone knows what they were talking about.
- EvanAnderson 2y agoThey might be talking about using escape sequences to map additional codepoints into ASCII. It was designed to be extensible. See: https://web.archive.org/web/20150810075144/http://bobbemer.com/ESCAPE.HTM https://web.archive.org/web/20150810075144/http://bobbemer.c...
- kevin_thibedeau 2y agoBespoke hardware for text handling isn't a thing these days but would have been in the 60's and 70's. A table layout that can be easily decoded in hardware simplifies the necessary circuitry for responding to control characters or converting binary numbers to/from decimal when the microprocessor hadn't been invented yet.
- gumby 2y agoIt was originally implemented in actual hardware (rods and bars). Just look inside a teletype, like a KSR-23 (pre ascii, but similar)