Follow us :

What Is the Meaning of ANSI?

publisherHELEN YANG

time2013/10/15

Short for the American National Standards Institute, ANSI seeks to strengthen the U.S. marketplace's position in the world's economy by overseeing the development and use of norms, or standards. These "voluntary consensus" standards allow for compatibility between electronics and across brands, greatly benefiting the consumer. The ANSI C programming language, sometimes called the ANSI programming language, remains a powerful example of ANSI's importance in today's world.

American National Standards Institute

  • ANSI has played an important standardization role in the computer world, overseeing everything from programming languages to basic computer characters. With the development of the first standard character set for computers, known as ASCII, ANSI provided 256 standardized characters for all computers to use. Today, all modern operating systems can recognize ASCII, providing a basis for nearly all computer programming languages today.

C Programming Language

  • First developed in 1972 at Bell Telephone Laboratories, the C programming language provided a higher-level programming language for developers to use with the Unix operating system. C underwent changes to make it more portable and to fix problems left over from its predecessor language B. By the early 1980s, developers realized that C needed a formal standard, leading ANSI to form the X3J11 committee to produce a C standard.