Data representation methods in a computer.

2.2.2.1 ASCII code

ASCII is an acronym of American Standard Code for Information Interchange. This code assigns the letters of the alphabet, decimal digits from 0 to 9 and some additional symbols a binary number of 7 bits, putting the 8th bit in its off state or 0. This way each letter, digit or special character occupies one byte in the computer memory.

We can observe that this method of data representation is very inefficient on the numeric aspect, since in binary format one byte is not enough to represent numbers from 0 to 255, but on the other hand with the ASCII code one byte may represent only one digit. Due to this inefficiency, the ASCII code is mainly used in the memory to represent text.


2.2.2.2 BCD Method

BCD is an acronym of Binary Coded Decimal. In this notation groups of 4 bits are used to represent each decimal digit from 0 to 9. With this method we can represent two digits per byte of information.

Even when this method is much more practical for number representation in the memory compared to the ASCII code, it still less practical than the binary since with the BCD method we can only represent digits from 0 to 99. On the other hand in binary format we can represent all digits from 0 to 255.

This format is mainly used to represent very large numbers in mercantile applications since it facilitates operations avoiding mistakes.

2.2.2.3 Floating point representation

This representation is based on scientific notation, this is, to represent a number in two parts: its base and its exponent.

As an example, the number 1234000, can be represented as 1.123*10^6, in this last notation the exponent indicates to us the number of spaces that the decimal point must be moved to the right to obtain the original result.

In case the exponent was negative, it would be indicating to us the number of spaces that the decimal point must be moved to the left to obtain the original result.