VMS Help EXAMINE, Qualifiers, /ASCII  *Conan The Librarian (sorry for the slow response - running on an old VAX)

    Displays the data at the specified location in ASCII format.

    Binary values that do not have ASCII equivalents are displayed as
    periods (.).

    When you specify the /ASCII qualifier, or when ASCII mode is the
    default, hexadecimal is used as the default radix for numeric
    literals that are specified on the command line.