Number and Letter Representation
In this lesson you will learn about number and letter representation via ASCII and Unicode encoding.
We'll cover the following...
We'll cover the following...
Character representation in binary
A computer can store all types of numbers ranging from negative to positive numbers and fractional to whole numbers. However, it can also store non-numeric data that can take on a number of discrete values, like the four seasons of a year. If you can assign a number to each possible distinct value, you can represent non-numeric data, such as text characters, on a computer. ASCII and Unicode are universal codes that encode a particular character into a binary number.
Figure 1: Multiple non-numeric characters and symbols.
First came ASCII, which was initially a seven-bit encoding system as shown in Figure 2. Although seven bits were enough to cover all the characters in the English language and ...