Which encoding standard represents English characters as numbers, with each letter assigned a number from 0 to 127?

The encoding standard that represents English characters as numbers, assigning each letter a unique number from 0 to 127, is ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). ASCII is a character encoding scheme developed in the 1960s that uses a set of 128 specific binary numbers to represent characters, including the English alphabet (both uppercase and lowercase), digits, punctuation marks, and control characters.

The significance of ASCII lies in its simplicity and the fact that it provides a standardized way to represent characters using binary code, which allows computers and various types of hardware to communicate and store character data uniformly. Since each character in ASCII is represented by 7 bits, the values range from 0 to 127, effectively covering the basic English alphabet without the need for additional symbols or characters.

Other encoding standards mentioned do not fit this description as clearly. ISO 8859-1 extends ASCII to represent additional characters found in Western European languages, thus covering more than just the basic ASCII characters. UTF-8 is a variable-width character encoding that can represent every character in the Unicode character set and is backward compatible with ASCII, but it includes more than the simple 0-127 range. Unicode is a comprehensive character encoding standard that encompasses a vast array of characters