Definition of ANSI (American National Standards Institute)

the main industrial standardization organization in the United States. There are official ANSI standards in almost all industries, and many of them have to do with computers. In computer programming, ANSI most often refers to one of the following:

1. ANSI standard versions of C, FORTRAN, COBOL, or other programming languages. Typically, a particular manufacturer's version of a language will include all of the features defined in the ANSI standard, plus additional features devised by the manufacturer. To be easily transportable from one computer to another, a program should not use any features that are not in theANSI standard. The programmer can then produce executable versions of it for different types of computers by compiling the same program with different compilers.
2. ANSI standard escape sequences for controlling the screen of a computer terminal or microcomputer. An escape sequence is a series of character codes which, when sent to the screen, causes the screen to do something other than simply display the characters to which the codes correspond. The ANSI escape sequences all begin with theASCII Escape character (code 27). See ANSI screen control.
3. The ANSI extended character set used in MicrosoftWindows, and shown in Table 2. It includes all the ASCII characters plus many others. See ASCII ; IBM PC; Unicode; Windows (Microsoft).