Welcome back.

In this lesson, you're going to learn an

important principle of computer science, everything is a number, or put a different
way, computers only work with numbers. If we were to delve into the hardware, we
would find that it only deals with bits, 0's and 1's. We're not going to look into
the particulars of the hardware, but the important thing to know is that
computers can only work with numbers, and really, can only do math. In fact, there
is nothing that
a computer can do that you cannot do. Computers can just do math really fast,
so they can operate on large sets of data billions of times
more quickly than you or I could by hand. Fortunately, you do not typically need
to think about the details of the bits, due to a wonderful principle
called abstraction. Before we talk more about
how everything is a number, we'll take a minute to
talk about abstraction. Abstraction is the separation of
the interface, what a thing does, or how you use it from the implementation,
how it does that, or how it works. You can understand abstraction and its
usefulness with
a non-computer related example. Think for a moment about driving a car. Abstraction
lets someone drive
a car without knowing how it works. I know that if I press down on
the gas pedal, my car will go faster. However, I do not know about the
complicated inner workings of my car that make that happen. Abstraction often comes
in layers, and what layer you need to work at
depends on what you need to do. For someone driving a car, the level of
abstraction appropriate to think about is what the controls of the car do. The
inner workings under the hood
are hidden and not important. However, for a mechanic, the details under the hood
are important
and are what she works with day to day. But even there,
there's a different level of abstraction. The mechanic is concerned with how
the parts of the engine fit together and work together, but maybe not with the
physics that go into designing the engine. The engineers who designed the car would
have worked at that level of abstraction, applying physics to make
a car that works properly. Of course, there is an even
lower level of abstraction and more theoretical physics that they
did not concern themselves with. We could keep going down until we
reach the most theoretical physics at the boundaries of human knowledge, all things
that you do not
need to know to drive a car. These same concepts apply in programming. The level of
abstraction that you
need depends on what you are doing. Before this class, you have probably used a
computer without
knowing anything about how programs work. Now you will learn how programs work, but
there will be deeper levels of abstraction that you generally will
not need to know about. Now that you know about abstraction,
let us return to the principle that everything is a number,
giving you a bit of a peek under the hood. You may be a bit surprised by this idea,
since you're used to using your computer working with things that do not
seem like numbers, such as letters. However, these are relatively
easy to encode as numbers. We could go with a = 1,
b = 2, and so forth. What computers actually do
is represent characters, symbols that can be letters,
digits, punctuations, and so on. One way to encode characters is ASCII,
in which, A is 65, a is 97,! is 33, and various other characters
have other numerical values. If you needed to look up
the numerical value of a character, you could find them in an ASCII table. However,
you generally do
not need to worry about the particular numerical values,
due to the joys of abstraction. Once we have characters, we can also have strings,
sequences of characters such as "Hello!". Strings com up quite often
in computer science, as programmers frequently
want to manipulate text. In fact, you've seen strings in HTML. Strings are another
great
example of abstraction. You can write "Hello!", and it gets turned into numbers
that
your computer can work with. You generally do not have to think
about the numeric representation, but you can manipulate it if your
programming task calls for it. So why is it so important to know
that everything is a number? Well, sometimes you want to do math with
things that do not seem like numbers. Cryptography, the science of
keeping information secure, relies on the ability
to do math on strings. When you visit a website using HTTPS, the
information sent back and forth between your computer and the web server is
encrypted so that nobody else can read it. That process involves
doing math on that data. Another reason that it is important to
understand that everything is a number is because this is why
programming languages have types, which tell it how to
operate on these numbers. Even though everything is a number, programmers want to
interpret
those values in different ways. Do the numbers mean letters? Do they mean pictures?
Do they actually just mean plain numbers? The type of the data tells what
the numbers mean, and thus, how to operate on them. If we add two strings together,
we might want to concatenate them, put one after the other
to form a longer string. In that case, the string "1" +
the string "1" would be the string "11". If we have just the number 1 and
we add it to 1, we would get 2. A third reason why the everything is
a number principle is important is that whenever you have data you want to work
with, you need to represent it as numbers. You may be able to use existing types,
such as strings, which already represent
information as numbers, to help you out. Such is the joy of abstraction. One other
thing that may surprise you is
that programs themselves are numbers. Then again, it may not surprise you, since
you just learned that
everything is a number. As you have already seen, you express your algorithms to
the computer by writing text. The code that you type in is a string. Another
program takes this string and
figures out how to turn it into numerical instructions that
the computer can execute. The fact that programs are numbers
is actually quite powerful. It means that you can download and
run new programs on your computers. They're just data, like everything else. The
fact that programs
are also just like data is at the heart of many security issues. Hackers give a
program input
that have the numeric encodings of instructions they want to execute, and
then trick the program into running it. Of course, as you write programs, you do
not need to worry about the numerical encoding details, all because of
the wonderful ideas of abstraction. So in this lesson,
you learned that everything is a number, an important principle since
computers can only do math. You learned about abstraction, the separation of
interface from
implementation, and how that means that you may not always need to think about how
things are numbers to compute with them.