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Data Representation Theory_Notes

The document discusses various data representation systems, including binary, octal, hexadecimal, ASCII, BCD, EBCDIC, and Unicode, highlighting their advantages and disadvantages. It explains how binary is the foundational system for computers, while octal and hexadecimal provide more human-friendly representations. Additionally, it covers character sets like ASCII and Unicode, detailing their usage, benefits, and limitations in data encoding.

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15 views5 pages

Data Representation Theory_Notes

The document discusses various data representation systems, including binary, octal, hexadecimal, ASCII, BCD, EBCDIC, and Unicode, highlighting their advantages and disadvantages. It explains how binary is the foundational system for computers, while octal and hexadecimal provide more human-friendly representations. Additionally, it covers character sets like ASCII and Unicode, detailing their usage, benefits, and limitations in data encoding.

Uploaded by

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© © All Rights Reserved
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Data Representation Notes

Binary System
- Using binary system the data is represented in two possible state, that is, 0s and 1s, thus in
base 2.
- Most computing devices use binary numbering to represent electronic circuit voltage state,
(i.e., on/off switch), which considers 0 voltage input as off and 1 input as on.

Advantages of binary codes


- Binary codes are suitable for the computer applications and digital communications.
- Binary codes make the analysis and designing of digital circuits easier since only 0 and 1 are
used.
- Calculations can be carried out using reasonably simple active electronics (simple transistor
circuits), since it only requires on and off (1 and 0) signals.
- Binary data is also reasonable simple to store - again only needing a two state storage (on/off -
1/0)

Disadvantages of binary codes


- Difficult for most people to read.
- It takes a lot of digits to represent any reasonable number (for instance up to 99 million takes 8
digits in Decimal and 27 digits in Binary).

Octal Representation
- It is commonly used as a shorter representation of binary numbers by grouping binary digits
into threes.
- It is also used as a shorthand for representing file permissions on UNIX systems and
representation of UTF8 numbers
Advantages of octal representation
- Easier to work with than binary
- Conversions to and from binary are straight forward
Disadvantages
- Computer does not understand octal number system directly, so we need octal to binary
converter.

Hexadecimal arithmetic
- Hexadecimal can be used to write large binary numbers in just a few digits.
- It makes life easier as it allows grouping of binary numbers which makes it easier to read,
write and understand. It is more human-friendly, as humans are used to grouping together
numbers and things for easier understanding.
- Since computers can't understand hexadecimal, we get a piece of software to convert it to
binary for us.
- Hexadecimal is used to instructional codes in the computer.

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Advantages of hexadecimal representation

- Easier to work with and read than a chain of binary digits.


- Easy to conversions from binary.
- It easier to read, write and understand.
- It is more human-friendly, as humans are used to grouping together numbers and things for
easier understanding.
Disadvantages
- Computer does not understand octal number system directly, so we need octal to binary
converter.
Character set
- A character set refers to all the characters that a computer system can recognise, which often
equates to characters on the keyboard.
- The characters within a character set can be text, number or even symbols.
- Each character is represented as a number.
- Examples of character set used by general computers to represent characters are ASCII,
UNICODE, BCD and EBCDIC.
American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII)
- The ASCII code associates an integer value for each symbol in the character set, such as letters,
digits, punctuation marks, special characters, and control characters.
- ASCII is widely used in computers of all types and communications equipment.
- ASCII codes also occupy a lot of disc storage space.
- The ASCII codes are of two types namely ASCII-7 and ASCII-8.

• ASCII-7
- ASCII-7 is a 7-bit standard ASCII code.
- ASCII-7 allows 27 = 128 combinations/128unique symbols to be represented.

• ASCII-8
- It is an extended version of ASCII-7.
- ASCII-8 allows 28 = 256 combinations/256 unique symbols.

- The ASCII table below has 128 characters, with values from 0 through 127.

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Table: ASCII character set

Codes 0 to 31 and 127 represent non printable control characters.


o Codes 48 to 57 stand for numeric 0-9.
o Codes 65 to 90 stand for uppercase letters A-Z.
o Codes 97 to 122 stand for lowercase letters a-z.
o Codes 128 to 255 are the extended ASCII codes.
- The space character is the 33rd value, followed by punctuations, digits, uppercase characters
and lowercase characters.
- It is important to note that digit characters have code values that differ from their numeric
equivalents: the code value of '0' is 48, that of '1' is 49, that of '2' is 50, and so forth.
- For example, 32 is the ASCII code for a space. So 32 = 00100000 (in binary)
- The name Adria in ASCII is represented as 65 100 114 105 97 since 65 represents A, 100
represents d, 114 represents r, 105 represents i and 97 represents a.

Advantages of using ASCII


- It uses the English language and can hold all the alphanumeric characters
- It uses less space than Unicode because it doesn't have many characters
- It has a "free" bit which can be used for error detection during data transmission.
- Most computers use ASCII codes, which makes it possible to transfer data from one computer
to another.

Disadvantages of using ASCII


- It only makes use of the English language.
- ASCII does not display characters read from a UNICODE document correctly.

Binary Coded Decimal (BCD)


- BCD is used to represent some numbers that are not proper numbers (numbers that don’t
behave like numbers), for example, barcode.
- In BCD, each decimal digit is simply changed into a four-bit binary number which are then
placed one after another in order.
- The following shows decimal digits in BCD:
0 0000
1 0001
2 0010
3 0011
4 0100
5 0101
6 0110
7 0111
8 1000
9 1001

- The decimal number 41 is coded as 0100 0001


- The decimal number 9212 is thus coded as 1001 0010 0001 00102 in BCD

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Advantages of using BCD
- It is easy to convert a number from BCD to decimal form and vice versa.
- It is also simple to implement a hardware algorithm for the BCD converter.
- No rounding off errors since there is no rounding off numbers when computing fractional
numbers.

Disadvantages of using BCD


- BCD code for a given decimal number requires more bits than the straight binary code and
hence there is difficult to represent the BCD form in high speed digital computers in arithmetic
operations.
- The arithmetic operations using BCD code require a complex design of Arithmetic and Logic
Unit (ALU) than the straight binary number system
- The speed of the arithmetic operations that can be realised using BCD code is naturally slow
due to the complex hardware circuitry involved.

Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC)


- The Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC) uses 8 bits to represent a
symbol in the data.
- EBCDIC allows 28 = 256 different characters to be represented.
- EBCDIC codes are mainly used in the mainframe and mini computers.

Advantages of using EBCDIC


- An eight-bit code thus having a total of 256 different combinations.
- Code words are all of equal length so relatively easy to decode.

Disadvantages of using EBCDIC


- Unlike ASCII there is no "free" bit which can be used for error detection. If a computer using
this code for internal representation is to be connected to a data transmission system, the data
will generally have to be converted to ASCII before transmission

UNICODE
- Unicode is a universal character encoding standard for the representation of text which
includes letters, numbers and symbols in multi-lingual environments.
- Uses 16-bits which represent 65536 different characters.
- It is enough to represent characters in any language, even Chinese and hieroglyphics.
- Most Microsoft Software and Linux distributions use UNICODE.

Advantages of using UNICODE


- It can store characters from more than one language
- It can store characters from languages with more than 250 characters
- Unicode is almost universally accepted by computing platforms, browsers, and mobile devices

Disadvantages of using UNICODE


- Unicode uses a lot more space since it has a lot of characters

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