October 2000
Intermediate to advanced
400 pages
13h 30m
English
Content preview from Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software, First EditionBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 20. ASCII and a Cast of Characters
Digital computer memory stores only bits, so anything that we want to work with on the computer must be stored in the form of bits. We’ve already seen how bits can represent numbers and machine code. The next challenge must be text. After all, the great bulk of the accumulated information of this world is in the form of text, and our libraries are full of books and magazines and newspapers. Although we’d eventually like to use our computers to store sounds and pictures and movies, text is a much easier place to begin.
To represent text in digital form, we must develop some kind of system in which each letter corresponds to a unique code. Numbers and punctuation also occur in text, so codes for these must ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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