Diary Entry — Aug. 4th, 2024
Today, I finished another part of the CS50x lecture for week 0. Things are getting pretty interesting.
Disclaimer: The layout of this article does not represent the actual order in which any content made by others was presented.
Today, I finished another part of the CS50x lecture for week 0. Things are getting very interesting. It turns out, the representation of numbers through binary digits is only the most straightforward application of standard representation systems. Now, there’s also letters, colors, and even a general discussion of how picture, audio and video might be represented!
Week 0 Continued: Back to Lecture
ASCII
Professor David J. Malan, the instructor of the course (who appears in the picture above) moves on from numbers to ask the question: how do you represent letters? The question seemed a little difficult to me because letters aren’t numbers, and professor Malan mentions that there are no more building blocks available; just numbers represented in binary form.
It turns out, these numbers themselves can assigned letters, allowing the interpretation of these numbers as letters within context. The first standard that was set in order to achieve that was…
