ASCII 36 — $

The dollar sign is the currency symbol for the United States dollar and numerous other currencies around the world. In programming, '$' plays diverse roles: in PHP, all variable names start with '$'; in shell scripting, '$' denotes variable expansion and substitution; in JavaScript template literals, '${...}' enables string interpolation; in regular expressions, '$' anchors a match to the end of a line or string. The LaTeX typesetting system uses paired '$' characters to delimit inline mathematical expressions.

Symbol characters in ASCII include mathematical operators, logical notation, and special-purpose marks that serve critical roles across programming, mathematics, and digital communication. Symbols are heavily context-dependent — the same character may act as an arithmetic operator in one language, a regex metacharacter in another, and a shell configuration flag in a third context. This contextual polyvalence makes symbols among the most functionally overloaded characters in computing, requiring careful attention to their meaning in each domain.

In the ASCII encoding table, Dollar Sign is assigned code point 36 in decimal (0x24 hexadecimal, 044 octal, 00100100 binary). The 7-bit ASCII standard, first published in 1963 by the American Standards Association, defines exactly 128 characters that remain the foundation of text encoding systems worldwide. UTF-8, the dominant encoding on the modern web, is fully backward compatible with ASCII — every ASCII character is encoded as the identical single byte in UTF-8, guaranteeing that Dollar Sign works reliably across all operating systems, programming languages, and internet protocols.