Computer Architecture

2

DATA REPRESENTATION

A computer is a device that represents things in the real world and performs manipulations on these representations. Entities that we might want to represent and make computations about include physical objects, numbers, words, sounds, and pictures. This chapter examines systems for representing each of these types of entities.

We’ll begin by exploring the history of how representations of objects, numbers, and text have evolved. We’ll then look at the modern symbol systems used to represent numbers—including decimal, binary, and hex—and use number representations to construct representations of further entities, such as ...