What are ASCII and ISCII ? Why are these used ?

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It uses a 7-bit code and it can represent 128 characters. ASCII code is mostly used to represent the characters of English language, standard keyboard characters as well as control characters like Carriage Return and Form Feed. ISCII stands for Indian Standard Code for Information Interchange. It uses a 8-bit code and it can represent 256 characters. It retains all ASCII characters and offers coding for Indian scripts also. Majority of the Indian languages can be represented using ISCII.