CODEWITHSUNDEEP
binarynumbersasciirepresentation
Balkis
Balkis

Reputation: 103

Representation of numbers in the computer

In the representation of inputs in the computer, the numbers are taken as characters and encoded with Ascii code or are they converted directly to binary? in other way: When my input is considered as integer and not a character?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 83

Answers (2)

bogl
bogl

Reputation: 1864

Both are possible, and it depends on the application. In other words the software programmer decides. In general, binary representation is more efficient in terms of storage requirements and processing speed. Therefore binary representation is more usual, but there are good examples when it is better to keep numbers as strings:

  • to avoid problems with conversions
  • phone numbers
  • when no adequate binary representation is available (e.g. 100 digits of pi)
  • numbers where no processing takes places
  • to be continued ...

Upvotes: 1

Amit
Amit

Reputation: 46361

The most basic building block of electronic data is a bit. It can have only 2 values, 0 and 1. Other data structures are built from collection of bits, such as an 8-bit byte, or a 32-bit float.

When a collection of bits needs to be used to represent a character, a certain encoding is used to give lexical meaning to these bits, such as ASCII, UTF8 and others.

When you want to display character information to the screen, you use a graphical layer to draw pixels representing the "character" (collection of bits with matching encoding) to the screen.

Upvotes: 1

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