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Fix typo in ASCII encoding explanation #230

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Fix typo in ASCII encoding explanation #230

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2 changes: 1 addition & 1 deletion docs/avoid.rst
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Expand Up @@ -64,7 +64,7 @@ A sign that something is about to go wrong with encodings is if a developer is t

ASCII is a set of 128 character codes (95 of them displayable). It has not had any new characters added to it since the backslash was added in 1967.

Because ASCII is a 7-bit encoding but our computers use 8-bit bytes, it seems clear that ASCII *could* be extended to assign a meaning to all 256 possible bytes. There are many different encodings that have done so, and they're all incompatible with one another, which is why treating bytes as characters as a bad idea and why we have Unicode now.
Because ASCII is a 7-bit encoding but our computers use 8-bit bytes, it seems clear that ASCII *could* be extended to assign a meaning to all 256 possible bytes. There are many different encodings that have done so, and they're all incompatible with one another, which is why treating bytes as characters is a bad idea and why we have Unicode now.

Many developers refer to one of these encodings as "extended ASCII", whose colloquial meaning is "the encoding of 256 characters that I learned first". Its meaning is completely dependent on the country you were in and the operating system you were using when you started programming:

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