Working with Data: Types

One of the basics of computer science is the concept of data types. In the simplest case, a type is a way of interpreting the digital bits in a computer's memory or in a data stream for or from a storage device. Bits have one of two values (on/off), and they are typically grouped together logically into bytes. Bytes began as collections of bits that could represent a single character; the first implementations were of six bits, but today bytes are typically either bits so that more characters can be represented by a single byte. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.