Leet (or "1337"), also known as eleet or leetspeak, is an alternative alphabet for the English language that is used primarily on the Internet. It uses various combinations of ASCII characters to replace Latinate letters. For example, leet spellings of the word leet include 1337 and l33t; eleet may be spelled 31337 or 3l33t. The term leet is derived from the word elite. The leet alphabet is a specialized form of symbolic writing. Leet may also be considered a substitution cipher, although many dialects or linguistic varieties exist in different online communities. The term leet is also used as an adjective to describe formidable prowess or accomplishment, especially in the fields of online gaming and in its original usage, computer hacking. http://www.google.com/intl/xx-hacker/
I thought that ASCII 'characters' were numbers either in decimal, hexadecimal or octal. 'leet' in hex is 6C 65 65 74. What combination of ASCII characters is used to represent l as 1, e as 3 or t as a 7? I'm genuinely curious about this as my own experience of ASCII goes back to when I had to sometimes use ASCII codes to produce text long before Windows was born.
There is only one version of ASCII. The whole point is that it is a standard. American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It was developed way before Windows as you say. It only had 127 characters (everything you can get on your keyboard, plus several non-printable control characters). ASCII 7 (Bel - short for Bell ) used to be my favourite back in the days of dot matrix printers, because you could send it over the Novel Netware managed network to the dotty in the other room, and have people in there wondering why their printer kept randomly beeping at them. Although still very widely used, ASCII's days are numbered, because its character set is far too limited to deal with international data. Try writing Chinese or Arabic in ASCII, it aint gonna happen as they say. So UTF is taking over, and the name is often incorrectly used interchangeably with Unicode, which is something else entirely (Unicode is just a way of representing different character sets, UTF kind of is the character sets). In one of the UTF formats (there are several), it is possible that there is an encoding somewhere where 1 = l etc, but if there is, I don't know of it
I just love what happens in Threads on GC.:D Take this one for instance, Fidgesmum started a thread asking for plain speaking and it took just 5 posts before it mutated into geek speak!! :DOH: Fantastic
