Art of Assembly Language, 1st Edition

2.15. 2.15 Characters

Perhaps the most important data type on a personal computer is the character data type. The term "character" refers to a human or machine readable symbol that is typically a non-numeric entity. In general, the term "character" refers to any symbol that you can normally type on a keyboard (including some symbols that may require multiple key presses to produce) or display on a video display. Many beginners often confuse the terms "character" and "alphabetic character." These terms are not the same. Punctuation symbols, numeric digits, spaces, tabs, carriage returns (ENTER), other control characters, and other special symbols are also characters. When this text uses the term "character" it refers to any of these characters, ...