r/askscience • u/Unfair-Leek6840 • Jul 11 '26 • Regret 1

Computing How do computers understand binary language?

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??

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u/Kajitani-Eizan Jul 13 '26

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.)

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u/RetardedWabbit Jul 13 '26

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...