The Art of Assembly Language, 2nd Edition

2.14 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 nonnumeric 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, not just the alphabetic ...