MOUNT KENYA UNIVERSITY (MOMBASA DIST LEARNING)

NAME: NEKESA LILIAN MUNIALO

ADM NO: BEDA/2022/49946

SCHOOL OF COMPUTING & INFORMATICS

UNIT CODE: BUCU002

UNIT TITLE: COMPUTER APPLICATIONS

LECTURER: MUCHIRI NYAGA

TASK 7

DATA AND PROGRAM REPRESENTATION

Data and programming

A digital logic circuit is defined as one in which voltages are assumed to be having a finite
number of distinct values. Types of digital logic circuits are combinational logic circuits and
sequential logic circuits. These are the basic circuits used in most digital electronic devices like
computers, calculators, and mobile phones. Digital logic circuits are often known as switching
circuits because in digital circuits the voltage levels are assumed to be switched from one value
to another value instantaneously. These circuits are termed logic circuits, as their operation obeys
a definite set of logical rules.
Bit and bytes
Bit
Bit stands for binary digit. That’s the full form of Bit. It’s binary either 0 or 1. Just the two digits.
No more digits are required. Our computing devices are smart enough to make sense of the
combination of just these two digits to process a humongous amount of information.
A bit is the atomic, smallest, the most basic unit of data/information which is expressed &
communicated in computing. Also, in telecommunication. Our computers run machine
instructions and process data in form of bits.
Most of the devices treat 1 as a logical true value & 0 as a logical false value. If you have written
code anytime in your life you might be aware of the boolean data type – 1 for true & 0 for false.
Bytes
A byte is a collection of 8 bits. But why 8 bits?
Historically, the byte was used to represent/encode a single character of text in a computer.
Consequently, the computer architectures took bytes as the smallest addressable unit of memory
in computing.
In computers, the most common storage unit is a byte. Storage devices like hard drives, DVDs,
CDs, and USB sticks all have capacities in the form of bytes rather than bits.
It’s also a lot easier to deal with higher-level units than denoting things in bits every time. Hence
came kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, etc.
The majority of programming languages use bytes to store primitive data types. Let’s take Java
for example.
The language has several data types like short, int, long, float, double, boolean & char.
short data type takes 1 byte to get stored in memory. Similarly, an int primitive data type takes 4
bytes.
A long data type needs 8 bytes of memory. A boolean as stated earlier is just one bit of memory
that is 1 true & 0 false.
Byte Size And Possible Values
The number of bits per byte is especially important to programmers because memory is
organized as a sequence of bytes. The size of the byte determines the maximum numerical value
that can be stored in one byte. A byte that contains k bits can represent one of the 2k values (i.e.,
exactly 2k unique strings of 1s and 0s exist that have length k). Thus, a six-bit byte can represent
64 possible values, and an eight-bit byte can represent 256 possible values. As an example,
consider the eight possible combinations that can be achieved with three bits.
000 001 100 110
001 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 11

Bit ordering
In computing, the least significant bit (LSB) is the bit position in a binary integer representing
the binary 1s place of the integer. Similarly, the most significant bit (MSB) represents the
highest-order place of the binary integer. The LSB is sometimes referred to as the low-order
bit or right-most bit, due to the convention in positional notation of writing less significant digits
further to the right. The MSB is similarly referred to as the high-order bit or left-most bit. In both
cases, the LSB and MSB correlate directly to the least significant digit and most significant digit
of a decimal integer.
Bit indexing correlates to the positional notation of the value in base 2. For this reason, the bit
index is not affected by how the value is stored on the device, such as the value's byte order.
Rather, it is a property of the numeric value in the binary itself. This is often utilized in
programming via bit shifting: A value of 1 << n corresponds to the nth bit of a binary integer
(with a value of 2n).
Hexadecimal notation
Hexadecimal notation is a numbering system that uses a base (radix) of 16. Unlike decimal
notation (base 10) or binary notation (base 2), uses 16 digits: 0,1,2,3, 4, 5, 6, 7,8, 9, A, B, C, D,
E, and F. Programmers use it as a convenient way to represent binary notation, which is difficult
to read and prone to error when manipulated by humans. The two notational systems are easily
translated into one another because 16 is a power of 2. In contrast, decimal numbers are more
difficult to translate into binary numbers because they are in base 10, and they are not a power of
2. So also each hexadecimal number can represent 16 quantities, and a single hexadecimal
number can stand for four binary digits (for example, 1111 [15 in decimal] = F [hexadecimal]).
See binary notation, byte, decimal notation, and octal notation.
Technipages Explains Hexadecimal Notation
Hexadecimal is a numbering system used by programmers to simplify the binary numbering
system. Using and understanding the binary numbering system can sometimes be hard for
programmers to use, as computers use binaries, but programmers use the hexadecimal numbering
system to simplify the binary codes. The notation is in base 16, and it is made up of 16 digits: 0 –
9 and six more, which is A through to F.
In the binary system, 16 is equivalent to 24, and there is a linear relationship between the
numbers 2 and 16, hence, the relationship between the binary notation and the hexadecimal
notation. It means that one hexadecimal digit is equivalent to four binary digits. It can be used to
write large binary codes in simple digits, making it more human-friendly.
Hexadecimal is a helpful method to express binary numbers in present-day PCs in which a byte
is quite often characterized as containing eight binary digits. When demonstrating the substance
of PC stockpiling, one hexadecimal digit can speak to the course of action of four binary digits.
Two hexadecimal digits can speak to eight binary digits or a byte.
 Common Uses of Hexadecimal Notation
 You can use StandardColors or common color codes: hexadecimal notation
 To include arbitrary characters into a string using octal or hexadecimal notation.
 The decimal number “10” in hexadecimal notation, is “A”.
Common Misuses of Hexadecimal Notation

 Hexadecimal Notations were used to write poetic letters in the early days of human
evolution
Merits of Hexadecimal notation

The main advantage of using Hexadecimal numbers is that it uses less memory to store more
numbers, for example, they store 256 numbers in two digits whereas decimal number stores 100
numbers. This number system is also used to represent Computer memory addresses. It uses only
4 bits to represent any digit in binary and is easy to convert from hexadecimal to binary and vice-
versa. It is easier to handle input and output in the hexadecimal form. There is a wide number of
advantages in the data science field, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.

Demerits of Hexadecimal notation

The major disadvantage of the Hexadecimal number system is that it may not an easy to read and
write for people, and also difficult to perform operations like multiplications, and divisions using
a hexadecimal number system. Hexadecimal numbers are the most difficult number system for
dealing with Computer data.
Characters
Computers work in binary. As a result, all characters, whether they are letters, punctuation, or
digits are stored as binary numbers. All of the characters that a computer can use are
called character sets.
Two standard character sets in common use are:

 American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII)

 Unicode

ASCII code
 ASCII uses seven bits, giving a character set of 128 characters. The characters are represented in
a table, called the ASCII table. The 128 characters include:

 32 control codes (mainly to do with printing)

 32 punctuation codes, symbols, and space
 26 upper-case letters
 26 lowercase letters
 numeric digits 0-9
We tend to say that the letter ‘A’ is the first letter of the alphabet, ‘B’ is the second, and so on, all
the way up to ‘Z’, which is the 26th letter. In ASCII, each character has its own assigned
number.

Extended ASCII
Extended ASCII uses eight bits, giving a character set of 256 characters. This allows for special
characters such as those with accents in languages such as French and Spanish.
Unicode
While suitable for representing English characters, 256 characters are far too small to hold every
character in other languages, such as Chinese or Arabic. Unicode uses 16 bits, giving a range of
over 65,000 characters. This makes it more suitable for those situations.