Character Form of a Decimal Digit

Understanding Character Form of a Decimal Digit

  • The Character Form of a Decimal Digit refers to the representation of a numerical digit as a character set or code.
  • It is a method used to give numerical digits a readable and recognisable form in computing systems.
  • Most commonly used character coding system is ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), which assigns a unique set of binary digits to each character, including decimal digits.

How Decimal Digits are Represented in Character Form

  • In ASCII, decimal digits from 0 to 9 are assigned code values from 48 to 57.
  • For example, the character form of the decimal digit 0 is given by the ASCII code value 48, which in binary is 0110000.
  • Similarly, the character form of the decimal digit 9 is given by the ASCII decimal value 57, represented in binary as 0111001.

Conversion between Decimal and Character Form

  • Conversion from the decimal to the character form involves finding the corresponding ASCII value of the decimal digit, and then converting that value to binary if necessary.
  • In the reverse process, a binary number is first converted into its decimal form and then matched with the corresponding character using the ASCII table.

Importance of Character Form of a Decimal Digit in Computing

  • The Character Form of a Decimal digit finds wide application in day-to-day computing tasks, such as text processing and data storage.
  • It’s essential for computers to distinguish between the numerical value and its character representation. For instance, ‘2’ in ASCII does not equate to the numerical value 2.
  • It is also crucial in understanding the innate difference in processing costs, where characters require more memory to store and retrieve than numerical values.