5CHARACTER REPRESENTATION
Although computers are famous for their “number-crunching” capabilities, the truth is that most computer systems process character data far more often than numbers. The term character refers to a human- or machine-readable symbol that is typically a non-numeric entity. In general, a character is any symbol that you can type on a keyboard or show on a video display. In addition to alphabetic characters, character data includes punctuation marks, numeric digits, spaces, tabs, carriage returns (the ENTER key), other control characters, and other special symbols.
This chapter looks at how to represent characters, strings, ...
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