What does ASCII primarily represent?

ASCII, or American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard that represents text in computers and other devices that use text. The main function of ASCII is to assign a unique numeric value to each character, such as letters, digits, punctuation marks, and control characters. This allows computers to interpret and store text data in a format that can be understood across different systems.

For instance, the letter "A" is represented by the numeric value 65 in ASCII, while the number "0" is represented by 48. This system allows various types of characters to be consistently represented using numeric values, making it fundamental for text processing and data exchange in computing. The ASCII standard encompasses a total of 128 characters, covering a wide range of symbols used in English and basic control commands.

This differentiates ASCII from other formats that may represent numeric values, digital images, or audio signals. Those formats have their own specific encoding and representation methods that do not directly relate to the character-focused nature of ASCII.