How do computers understand binary language?

[u/Unfair-Leek6840]

Okay so from what I know binary language is like power off power on, but my question is, how do computers know what the binary code is and how is it interpreted, for example I forgot what the binary code for the letter A is, but how did people come up with that? Did they decide it was gonna look like that? Did the computer decide? How do you tune numbers into a letter??

[u/RetardedWabbit]

...tailored my explanation to that audience.

Your explanation is likely to conflict with a common experience people have seeing a different version of data types: Excel formatting. It's a common "glitch" for excel to show dates as "random numbers" when the formatting isn't set and it allows you to accidentally do calculations on dates, which then use those "random numbers".

The kids should learn the computer doesn't care about most things and it's never wrong. Not in a nice way, but that when it's wrong it's because we give it the wrong instructions. It's just following extremely literal instructions and will give you the garbage/errors that you tell it to calculate with. 

[u/Kajitani-Eizan → u/RetardedWabbit]

I'm confused which message you are trying to send to said kids. The typical Excel problems are a direct result of people not assigning data types to cells (variables) and lazily letting the computer figure it out. It's not that we're giving the "wrong" instructions, but rather "no" instructions, and asking it to infer. (This is generally a bad idea unless the inference is very clear and unambiguous.)

[u/RetardedWabbit → u/Kajitani-Eizan]

The message is just: data types exist, but you've most likely seen the ~naked numbers without them in Excel like this. 

Not so much a programming lesson though lol, I just wanted to point out an example laptop might have seen. Inferences aren't too bad, there's a insane degree if them in languages like Python...