How are the different data types "interpreted differently"? i am very new to programming and am trying to understand the purpose of data types aside from helping to allocate the right amount of memory for data. thanks a ton!!
by 
melisande
ANSWERS: 2
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Data can be thought of as storage+semantics: some place to put the actual bits (storage), and some way of saying what those bits MEAN in the context of the program. So for example, if I have a 16-bit (4 byte) block of memory with this pattern... 6565h ... the question is "what does it mean?". It could be the ASCII characters "AA", representing American Airlines in an air travel program. Or it could be the number of screws in a bin somewhere, or it could be individual "bit flags" which indicate the valves that are open in a fluid control process. In the first case, the data type would be "2 characters". In the second case, it would be an integer, and in the 3rd case it would be a bitmask. Different programming languages use different ways of expressing these ideas. But in all cases, we're still dealing with 2 bytes of storage.
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thanks stableboy! thank you much for your help and really, really appreciate it..and yes i think you passed the quiz wit flying colors! :) happy programming, m
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