Normally, the debugger considers a range of ASCII characters to be unprintable. When the debugger evaluates a given data item, a dot "." is printed instead of each character within that range. The "unprintable" ASCII range is usually any character whose ASCII value is less than 32, within the range of 127 to 159 inclusive, or greater than 254. When using the -8bit command-line option, the debugger will not assume that the ASCII characters within the range of 127 to 159 inclusive are unprintable. As a result, printable characters within the extended ASCII character set, which are supported by some terminals, are allowed to be printed. This is especially useful for terminals that support languages other than English.