Alteryx Foundation Micro-Credential Practice Exam

Which character set is considered to be the older of the two widely used sets?

1. Unicode

2. UTF-8

3. ASCII

4. ISO-8859

The correct answer is: ASCII

ASCII is recognized as the older character set among those listed. Developed in the early 1960s, it was one of the first character encodings to provide a standardized way to represent text in computers and electronic devices. ASCII uses a 7-bit encoding scheme and includes 128 characters, which cover the English alphabet, digits, punctuation marks, and control characters. The other options, while important in their own right, were developed later. Unicode was introduced in the late 1980s to represent characters from many different languages and includes a vastly larger set of characters, accommodating thousands of symbols beyond the original ASCII. UTF-8, which is a variable-width character encoding for Unicode, emerged in the early 1990s and has become the predominant character encoding on the web, designed to maintain backward compatibility with ASCII. ISO-8859 refers to a series of 8-bit character encodings that also emerged later to accommodate additional characters for various languages, starting from the late 1980s. Understanding the historical context of these character sets highlights why ASCII holds the designation of the older standard among them.