Code and information
- Humans is probably the only being that can represent information
  The way that human represent information is through the use of:
- Encoding is a process that converts some information into a number of symbols
  Decoding is the reverse process where the code symbols are converted by into a form that the hamun recipient can understand
  See Wikipedia for some more details: click here
Language is a form of code
- The English language is written using 26 symbols that we called letters:
- English-speaking people use these letter to encode (= represent information
  Examples: ecoding information on something found in reality in letters
Example of codes: Morse code
- The Morse code was invent to represent the English letters and numbers by short/long pulses
- Before modulation techniques were invented, we could only transmit pulses through radio waves
- English messages at that time were transmitted by radio using the Morse code
- Here is a Morse code table:
  (I only know how to send SOS using the Morse code: ... --- ...)
- The Morse code is an example of code that is used to represent text data.

The different kind of data that a computer program need to manipulate

In CS170/CS171, you have encountered all the possible data that computer programs need to manipulated:

Textual data (i.e.: words)

Java use the char data type to store values of textual data
(A variable of the char data type can store one single character.
A single character is not useful, so Java made a String type that is an object type consisting of an array of char.
But the fundamental data type in Java to store textual data is char.)

How the computer store the various types of data

Remember that:

Computer stores information in its (computer) RAM memory
Computer memory are constructed using electrical switches:
Each switch can remember one of the values of 0 or 1 (= a binary number of "bit").
As discussed previously, the computer RAM memory consists of a series of bytes; and each byte can store an 8 bit binary number

Overview of the different type of information that need to be store (= encoded) inside a computer program
- Overview of the different type of information in computer program:
  You can see that many of these are data types in a programming language
- The encoding method for these different information types are as follows:
  We will study all these encoding methods
  We will also discuss how to convert between some of the data types.