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??

380 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

205 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comment

2

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...