is ASCII code dependent on the language of the operating system?

Question

for example the SZ ligature(long S) ß is used in german alphabet. does it comes after is the ASCII code for it different on OS running in German? this a general question about the extra letters in any language that uses the latin alphabet with extra letters (like French, Danish or Flemish)

Answer 1

The ASCII standard defines 128 characters. The first 32 are control characters, which may be interpreted variously depending on the operating system. Some of the unused members of this set will print out as symbols - e.g. the ever-popular 03 (♥). The next 128 characters are sometimes referred to as extended ASCII and can be interpreted in many ways, depending on what encoding is defined for them. You can select which encoding your operating system uses as standard, but other encodings can be selected within applications, so that you can create word-processor documents in other languages, for example. However, including multiple languages within the same document can be a problem.

There are also other encoding systems besides ASCII. Some of them are simply alternatives (e.g., EBDIC) while others are used for languages where the western alphabet is not required.

A newer character code called Unicode was developed to solve the problem of multiple encodings. In Unicode, each code has a unique meaning.