How character sets (ASCII and UNICODE) are used to represent text

Question 1

What is meant by a character set?

Answer 1

A character set is a published collection of codes and corresponding characters which can be used by computers for representing text
- E.g. ASCII and Unicode

Question 2

What is meant by ASCII?

Answer 2

American Standard Code for Information Interchange

• Was the leading character set before Unicode
• Codes for numbers and symbols (128 characters)
• Disadvantage - limited character set/representing other languages with different characters

Question 3

What is meant by unicode?

Answer 3

• Unicode solves the problem of ASCII’s limited character set
• Uses a varying number of bits, allowing for over 1 million different characters
• Different languages, symbols and emojis

Question 4

Explain the trade-off between accuracy and range when representing numbers and give an example

Answer 4

• Larger mantissa increases accuracy
• Smaller exponent decreases range
• E.g. X = 64 and Y = 1.75