This section cover how the computer represents data. A computer has no idea what letters or numbers actually are, the only thing a computer can do is deal with a series of electrical signals that in turn through many processes will eventually be represented as letters, numbers, images and sound. This section have a brief look at how this is done.
WHAT IS DATA REPRESENTATION
Computer do not understand our natural language such as English, they do not even understand the language that you use to code such as Python or Java.
Just as with a light switch that can be ON or OFF, and with many light switches you can create different combinations of the light being on or off. Computer are not much different, imagine if you had just 8 light switches you can create 256 different combinations with the lights they control. Computers work with the same principle but have billions of combination, each combination representing something different such as the colour of one of the pixels on your screen or a letter on your keyboard.
To make it easy for humans to understand and work with, when a switch in a computer is on we represent this with a 1 and off we represent with a 0. These 1s and 0s are known as binary. The language machines use is called Machine Language and different Computer CPUs (Central Processing Units) have different ways of representing language they process.
Machine Language, also known as Machine Code is an example of a low-level language. It is the only language computers is capable of working with and all other languages must be converted before the machine can process.
The data representation section addresses how computers represent different aspect of language, numbers, calculations, colour, images, sound and data compression. The Processor Fundamentals section goes further to discuss how the processor uses the fundamentals of machine language and the Communication representation section it discusses how data is transferred from one machine to another.
