| Characters: ASCII | ||||||||||||
| Numbers are not the only kind of data to process. | ||||||||||||
| Need letters, digits, punctuation, etc. | ||||||||||||
| Assigning binary codes to characters is arbitrary. | ||||||||||||
| Finite set, unlike numbers. | ||||||||||||
| ASCII: American Standard Code for Information Interchange | ||||||||||||
| Standard: can be used by many kinds of computers, regardless of architecture. | ||||||||||||