Character groups

Control characters
Main article: Control character

ASCII reserves the first 32 codes (numbers 031 decimal) for control characters: codes
originally intended not to represent printable information, but rather to control devices (such as
printers) that make use of ASCII, or to provide meta-information about data streams such as
those stored on magnetic tape.
For example, character 10 represents the "line feed" function (which causes a printer to advance
its paper), and character 8 represents "backspace". RFC 2822 refers to control characters that do
not include carriage return, line feed or white space as non-whitespace control characters.[28]
Except for the control characters that prescribe elementary line-oriented formatting, ASCII does
not define any mechanism for describing the structure or appearance of text within a document.
Other schemes, such as markup languages, address page and document layout and formatting.
The original ASCII standard used only short descriptive phrases for each control character. The
ambiguity this caused was sometimes intentional, for example where a character would be used
slightly differently on a terminal link than on a data stream, and sometimes accidental, for
example with the meaning of "delete".
Probably the most influential single device on the interpretation of these characters was the
Teletype Model 33 ASR, which was a printing terminal with an available paper tape
reader/punch option. Paper tape was a very popula