ASCII 44 — ,

The comma is one of the most frequently used punctuation marks in both natural language and code. In programming, commas separate function arguments, array elements, object properties, and variable declarations across virtually every language. CSV (Comma-Separated Values) is one of the most widely used data interchange formats, relying entirely on the comma as its field delimiter. In English typography, comma placement conventions — particularly the Oxford comma debate — remain hotly contested. JavaScript's trailing comma support was a significant syntax change in ES5 and beyond.

Punctuation marks serve as the structural scaffolding of written language, delineating sentences, clauses, and phrases while conveying emphasis and grouping. In programming, these same characters gain powerful additional roles as operators, statement terminators, delimiters, and syntactic markers that compilers and interpreters rely upon. This dual significance in both natural language and code syntax means punctuation characters carry outsized functional importance relative to their small count in the ASCII character set.

In the ASCII encoding table, Comma is assigned code point 44 in decimal (0x2C hexadecimal, 054 octal, 00101100 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 Comma works reliably across all operating systems, programming languages, and internet protocols.