Question

After I type a character does it have it's own digital identity?

Answer 1

answer:“a” is typically represented by the value 97 in the computer, this can be expressed as 61 in hex which is typically how computer scientists talk about these types of values. In binary it’s “0110 0001”. If you save the “a” to disk in the form of a file, then those binary bits are written into your storage location from memory, and if you quit the program then the memory that was holding those bits is flagged as available to the operating system and can be overwritten by other programs running. When you re-launch the program, it will probably have a function that get’s called at launch that will load in your saved file, and will allocate a chunk of memory to hold those bits. As far as erasing and replacing goes, it really depends on how the programer wrote the program. Typically, each keystroke (e.g. hitting the “a” key or the “delete” key) will activate a function that will extend the contents of the text box’s representation—called a string see this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_(computer_science)#String_datatypes. Basically all text in a computer is like a long list of numbers with each number corresponding to a letter of the alphabet, symbol, or special characters (such as creating a new line). Here’s a list of the ASCII table which is an older system of representing letters as binary numbers, newer systems have been invented that take advantage of machines having much more memory, and allows for better handling of things like asian characters. UTF-8 is the preferred encoding these days.