Q. Main strength of ASCII?
One such standard code which enables language encoding that is popularly used is ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). This code employs 7 bits to signify 128 characters that involve 32 non-printing control characters, alphabets in upper and lower case, decimal digits and other printable characters which are available on your keyboard. Afterward as there was requirement for extra characters to be represented like additional special characters, graphics characters. ASCII was expanded to 8 bits to signify 256 characters (known as Extended ASCII codes). There are several variants of ASCII. They follow various code pages for language encoding though having same format. You can refer to complete set of ASCII characters on web. The expanded ASCII codes are codes used in most of Microcomputers.
The main strength of ASCII is that it's very well-designed in the way it represents characters. It is very easy to write a code to manipulate lower/uppercase ASCII characters and check for valid data ranges due to the manner of representation of characters. In the original ASCII the 8th bit (the most significant bit) was used for purpose of error checking as a check bit.