ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Exchange. The purpose of ASCII is to create a standard for character-sets used in electronic equipments. The standard ensures that different devices (which might be manufactured by differing companies) can communicate to each other with the same character-code. With this kind of standardization, programmers and computer manufactures will be “on the same page”. Imagine the problem if MAC and PC have different keyboard codes. The standard ASCII character-sets not only includes all the alphabetical letter and numbers, but also punctuation.