ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the various encodings and formats used for representing character and numeric data in digital systems. Numerical data is stored in standard formats, designed to minimize space and optimize processing. Historically, numeric data was stored in data structures devised to fit the characteristics of a specific machine, or the preferences of its designers. Data stored in processor registers, in magnetic media, in optical devices, or in punched tape is usually encoded in binary. Thus, the programmer and the operator can usually ignore the physical characteristics of the storage medium. Circuit designers group several individual cells to form a unit of storage that holds several bits. In a particular machine the basic unit of data storage is called the word size. In the low-to-low storage scheme the low-order 8-bits of the operand are stored in the low-order memory byte; the next group of 8-bits is moved to the following memory byte in low-to-high order, and so on.
