How Do I Save an ASCII Text File?

In the Windoze world, Notepad is a simple editor that saves text strictly in ASCII format. Clean, not embellishments or tags. Sometimes it needs to be that way.

What do I use to save ASCII text on a Mac? Somebody at the Apple store told me the answer is TextEdit, but when I went to save a file just now my choices were rich text (.rtf), HTML, Word format, or XML. No ASCII in the bunch.

So, is there a program on here that does what Notepad does? Is there one out there somewhere...??

--PS