Chapter 2

Representation of Information
in Computers
Contents

2.1. Number Systems

2.2. Number Representation in Computers - Units of
Information
2.3. Representation of Integers
2.4. Operations on Integers
2.5. Logical operations on Binary Numbers
2.6. Symbol Representation

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2.1. Number Systems

• Decimal System
• Base-b System
• Convertion from Decimal to Base-b
• Binary System
• Hexadecimal System
• Octal System

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Number Categories

• Natural numbers
• Integers
• Rational numbers
• Irrational numbers

• Numbers are written using positional notation

943 = 9 x 102 + 4 x 10 + 3

Only in base 10 (decimal)

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Decimal System

• The system has ten as its base

• Uses various symbols (called digits) for no more than ten
distinct values (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9) to represent
any number
• Decimal separator indicates the start of a fractional part
• Sign symbols + (positive) or − (negative) in front of the
numbers to indicate sign

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Decimal System (cont’d)

If i is an integer written in decimal form with digits dj:

i = dn-1dn-2 . . . . d1d0
then i represents the sum:
n 1

 j
d
j0
* 10 j

where n is the total number of digits, and dj is

the j th digit from the rightmost position in the
decimal number.

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Base-b System
• b digits is used in the representation of numbers.
• Example
1410 = 226 = 1123 = 11102
• If i is an integer written in base - b with digits dj:
i = dn-1dn-2 . . . . d1d0
then i represents the sum:
n 1
Convert from base b

j 0
d j *b j
to base 10
where n is the total number of digits, and dj is the j th digit
from the rightmost position in the decimal number.
• When the base is higher than 10, we need symbols to
represent the digits that correspondent to the decimal values
of 10 and beyond.

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Example

Convert 11101.112 to Decimal

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Convert integers from decimal to base b

Remainder Method:

• Let value = (dn-1 dn-2 … d2 d1 d0)10.

• First divide value by b, the remainder is the least
significant digit b0.
• Divide the result by b, the remainder is b1.
• Continue this process until the result is less than b, giving
the most significant digit, bm-1.
• The result is bm-1 bm-2 … b2 b1 b0

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Example 1

Use Remainder Method to convert 12 (base 10) to base 2

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Convert Decimal Fractions to Base-b

• Begin with the decimal fraction and multiply by b. The

whole number part of the result is the first digit to the
right of the point.

• Disregard the whole number part of the previous result

and multiply by b once again. The whole number part of
this new result is the second digit to the right of the
point.

• Continue this process until you get a zero as number’s

decimal part or until you recognize an infinite repeating
pattern.

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Example 1

Convert the decimal value .625 to a binary

representation
• 0.625 x 2 = 1.25
The first binary digit to the right of the point is a 1.
• 0.25 x 2 = 0.50,
The second binary digit to the right of the point is a 0.
• 0.50 x 2 = 1.00
The third binary digit to the right of the point is a 1.
• We had 0 as the fractional part of our result,

The representation of .625(10)= .101(2)

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Example 2
Binary representation of the decimal fraction 0.1
.1 x 2 = 0.2
The first binary digit to the right of the point is a 0
.2 x 2 = 0.4
The second binary digit to the right of the point is also a 0.
.4 x 2 = 0.8
The third binary digit to the right of the point is also a 0.
.8 x 2 = 1.6
The fourth binary digit to the right of the point is a 1.
.6 x 2 = 1.2
The fifth binary digit to the right of the point is a 1.
The next step to be performed (multiply 2. x 2) is exactly the same
action we had in step 2. We are then bound to repeat steps 2-5, then
return to Step 2 again indefinitely

.1 (decimal) = .00011001100110011 . . .
The repeating pattern is 0011

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Binary System

• All data, including programs, in a computer system is

represented in terms of groups of binary digits
• A single bit can represent one of two values, 0 or 1.
• If we have several symbols to represent, we can make a
one-to-one correspondence between the patterns and
the symbols.
• Example : 0, 1, 2, 3 are mapped to the patterns 00, 01,
10, 11
• A group of k binary digits (bits) can be used to represent
2k symbols

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Hexadecimal System

• Hexadecimal numbers have 16 different digits, that

are represented by the numbers from 0 to 9 and the
letters A, B, C, D, E and F.
• Example

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Octal System

• The octals numbers include only the representations for

the values from 0 to 7: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
• Example:
235 . 648
= 2x82 + 3x81 + 5x80 + 6x8-1 + 4x8-2
= 157. 812510

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Data Representation in a Computer-Units of Information

• Basic Principles
• Units of Information

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Basic Principles

• Data can be numbers, symbols, images, sounds . . .

• To store in computers, it’s necessary to represent data in
term of bit patterns
• There are different ways to encode different types of
data
• Numbers are converted to their binary representations
following some standard.
• Symbols are assigned a bit pattern
• Other data must be digitalized.

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Data and Computers

• Every task, a computer manages data in some way

• In the past, computers dealt exclusively with numeric
and textual data
• At present, computers are multimedia devices -> deal
with different type of data:
• Numbers
• Text
• Audio
• Images and Graphics
• Video
• All of data is stored as binary digits: strings of 1s and 0s

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Analog and Digital Information

• Most part of the natural world is continuous and infinite

• Computers are finite
• Information can be represented in analog or digital

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Binary Representation

• One binary digit can be either 0 or 1

• To represent more than 2 things, we need more binary
digits
• n binary digits can represent 2n things

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Representing Audio Information

• Digitize the sound wave

• Sampling: periodically measure the voltage of the signal
and record appropriate value
• Reproduce the sound: Use stored voltage values to
create a new continuous electronic signal
• Audio format : WAV,AU, AIFF, VQF, MP3

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Representing Colors

• Often expressed as an RGB (red – green – blue) value

• Three numbers indicate the contribution of each of three
primary colors
• Amount of data that used to represent a color is called
color depth
• HiColor: 16 bit color depth
• TrueColor: 24bit color depth

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Three Dimensional Color Space

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Some TrueColor RGB Values

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Digitized Images and Graphics

• Image is a collection of individual dots called pixel

• Each pixel is composed of a single color
• The number of pixel used to represent a picture is called
resolution

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Categorization of Data Types in programming

• Basic types : the standard scalar predefined types that

one would expect to find ready for immediate use in any
imperative programming language
• Structured types: made up from such basic types or
other existing higher level types.

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Units of information

• The smallest unit of information a computer can use is

bit (Binary Digit)
• The difference between two states (high current and low
current) is represented as one of two numbers (1 or 0).
• A collection of 8 bits are put together to form a byte
• Binary prefixes can be used to quantify computer
memory sizes
• Each successive prefix is multiplied by 1024 (210) rather
than the 1000 (103)

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Units of information

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Representation of Integers

• Unsigned Integers

• Signed Integers

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Unsigned Integers

• Unsigned integers are represented by a fixed number of

bits (typically 8, 16, 32, and/or 64)
• Only a finite set of numbers that can be represented:
• With 8 bits, 0…255 (0016…FF16) can be represented;
• With 16 bits, 0…65535 (000016…FFFF16) can be
represented
• If an operation on bytes has a result outside this range, it
will cause an ‘overflow’

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 Range of 8 bit representation

• Range[0, 255]  Number line in computers

0000 0000 =0
0000 0001 =1
0000 0010 =2
0000 0011 =3
.....
1111 1111 = 255
• Number line:

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Signed Integers

• The most significant bit is set to 0 and 1 for positive and

negative numbers
• Example
+4210 = 001010102
and so
-4210 = 110101102
• All number whose leftmost bit is 1 is considered negative

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Signed Integers (cont’d)

• If we have 4 bits in our representation then,

• The most positive representable number using sign-
and-magnitude is 0111
• The most negative representable number using sign-
and-magnitude is 1000
• How to represent negative number?

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Two’s Complement

• Representation for signed binary numbers

• Leading bit is a sign bit
• Binary number with leading 0 is positive
• Binary number with leading 1 is negative
• Magnitude of positive numbers is just the binary
representation
• Magnitude of negative numbers is found by
• Complement the bits: replace all the 1's with 0's, and
all the 0's with 1's
• Add one to the complemented number
• The carry in the most significant bit position is thrown
away when performing arithmetic

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Example
Performing two's complement on the decimal 42 to get -42

• Using a eight-bit representation

42 = 00101010 Convert to binary

11010101 Complement the bits

11010101 Add 1 to the complement

+ 00000001
11010110 Result is -42 in two's complement

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Two's Complement Arithmetic

• Computing 50 - 42 using a two's complement

representation with eight-bit numbers

50 - 42 = 50 + (-42) = 8

00110010 50

11010110 Two's complement of 42

Throw away the
high-order 00110010 Add 50 and -42
carry as we are + 11010110
using a eight bit 100001000
representation
00001000 Is the eight-bit result

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 Range of 8 bit representation

• Range [0, 255]  Number line in computers

0000 0000 =0
0000 0001 =1
0000 0010 =2
0000 0011 =3
.....
1111 1111 = 255
• Number line

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Operations on Integers

• Addition and Subtraction

• Multiplication and Division

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Addition and Subtraction

• Addition

• Subtraction

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Binary Addition

0+0=0
0+1=1
1+0=1
1 + 1 = 0, and carry 1 to the next more significant bit

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Example

00011010 + 00001100 = 00100110

1 1 carries
0 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 = 26 (base 10)
+ 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 = 12 (base 10)
0 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 = 38 (base 10)

00010011 + 00111110 = 01010001

1 1 1 1 1 carries
0 0 0 1 0 0 1 1 = 19 (base 10)
+0 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 = 62 (base 10)
0 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 = 81 (base 10)

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Binary Subtraction
0-0=0
0 - 1 = 1, and borrow 1 from the next more significant bit
1-0=1
1-1=0

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Overflow in addition

• Sum of two positive numbers is negative.

• Sum of two negative numbers is positive.

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Multiplication and Division

• Multiplication

• Division

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Binary Multiplication

0x0=0
0x1=0
1x0=0
1 x 1 = 1, and no carry or borrow bits

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Example

00101001 × 00000110 = 11110110

0 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 = 41(base 10)
× 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 = 6 (base 10)
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 1 0 1 0 0 1
0 0 1 0 1 0 0 1
0 0 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 0 = 246 (base 10)

00010111 × 00000011 = 01000101

0 0 0 1 0 1 1 1 = 23 (base 10)
× 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 = 3 (base 10)
1 1 1 1 1 carries
0 0 0 1 0 1 1 1
0 0 0 1 0 1 1 1
0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 = 69 (base 10)

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Binary Division

Binary division follows the same rules as in decimal

division .

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Logical Operations on Binary Numbers

• Logical Operations with One or Two Bits

• Logical Operations with One or Two Integers

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Logical Operations with One or Two Bits

AND: Compares 2 bits and if they are both 1, then the

result is 1, otherwise, the result is 0.
OR: Compares 2 bits and if either or both bits are 1, then
the result is 1, otherwise, the result is 0.
XOR: (Exclusive OR) : Compares 2 bits and if exactly one
of them is 1 then the result is 1 otherwise (if the bits are
the same), the result is 0.
NOT: Changes the value of a single bit. If it is a 1, the
result is 0; if it is a 0, the result is 1.
Truth Table of Logical Operations

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Logical Operations with One or Two Integers

• NOT
• AND
• OR
• XOR

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NOT operation

Unary operation which performs logical negation on

each bit, forming the ones' complement of the given
binary value. Digits which were 0 become 1, and vice
versa.
Example:
NOT 0111
= 1000

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AND operation

• An AND operation takes two binary representations of

equal length and performs the logical AND operation on
each pair of corresponding bits. In each pair, perform
AND operation on two bits
• Example:
0101
AND 0011
= 0001

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OR operation

• An OR operation takes two bit patterns of equal length,

and produces another one of the same length by
matching up corresponding bits (the first of each; the
second of each; and so on) and performing the logical OR
operation on each pair of corresponding bits.
• For example:
0101
OR 0011
= 0111

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XOR Operation

• An exclusive or operation takes two bit patterns of equal

length and performs the logical XOR operation on each
pair of corresponding bits.
• For example:
0101
XOR 0011
= 0110

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Symbol Representation

• Basic Principles
• ASCII Code Table
• Unicode Code Table

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Basic Principles

• Text documents can be decomposed into individual

characters
• It's important to handle character data
• Character data isn't just alphabetic characters, but also
numeric characters, punctuation, spaces, etc
• They need to be represented in binary
• There aren't mathematical properties for character data,
so assigning binary codes for characters is somewhat
arbitrary

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Character Set

• A list of characters and the codes used to represent each

one.
• By using a particular character set, computer
manufacturers have made the processing of data easier.
• Two popular character sets: ASCII & Unicode

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ASCII Code Table

• ASCII -- American Standard Code for Information Interchange

- permitted machines from different manufacturers to
exchange data.
• The ASCII standard was developed in 1963

• ASCII standard originally used 7 bits to represent characters -

> consists of 128 binary values (0 to 127), each associated
with a character or command
• The extended ASCII character set used 8 bits to represent
characters. It also consists 128 characters representing
additional special, mathematical, graphic and foreign
characters.

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The Standard ASCII Code Table

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The extended ASCII characters

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Limitations of ASCII character set

• String data types allocated one byte per character

• The extended version of ASCII which have 256
characters is ehough for English but not enough for
international use
• Logographic languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and
Korean need far more than 256 characters for
reasonable representation.
• Vietnamese need 61 characters for representation.
• Where can we find number for our characters?

 2bytes per character?

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Unicode Code Table

Before Unicode was invented. . . .

• There were hundreds of different encoding systems

• No single encoding could contain enough characters
• Encoding systems conflict with one another : two
encodings can use the same number for two different
characters, or use different numbers for the same
character.

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Unicode Character Set

• Provides a unique number for every character

• Uses 16 bits or more per character
• Has been adopted by such industry leaders as HP, IBM,
Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, and many others.
• Is supported in many operating systems, all modern
browsers, and many other products.

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Some Symbols in the Unicode Character Set

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Advantages of using Unicode

• Significant cost savings

• Enables software products to be targeted across multiple
platforms, languages and countries without re-
engineering.
• Allows data to be transported through many different
systems without corruption.

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