Digital character and primitive data types

Everything a computer stores — text, numbers, images — is ultimately encoded as binary. Programming languages give us primitive data types so the computer knows how to interpret those bits.

• Character encoding maps characters to numbers: ASCII (128 characters) and Unicode/UTF-8 (all the world's scripts).
• Common primitive types: integer (whole numbers), real/float (decimals), boolean (true/false), char (one character), string (text).
• Choosing the right type saves memory and prevents errors (age → integer, price → real, name → string).
• Type ranges matter: an integer type has a maximum value it can hold.

• ASCII — the classic 7-bit character encoding standard.
• Unicode — a universal encoding covering virtually all characters and emoji.
• Boolean — a type with only two values: true or false.