• Iron Lynx@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        ASCII was originally a 7-bit standard. If you type in ASCII on an 8-bit system, every leading bit is always 0.

        (Edited to specify context)

        At least ASCII is forward compatible with UTF-8

      • houseofleft@slrpnk.net
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        11 months ago

        Ascii needs seven bits, but is almost always encoded as bytes, so every ascii letter has a throwaway bit.

        • FuckBigTech347@lemmygrad.ml
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          11 months ago

          Some old software does use 8-Bit ASCII for special/locale specific characters. Also there is this Unicode hack where the last bit is used to determine if the byte is part of a multi-byte sequence.