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Chapter 1: Problem 12

What amount of memory is enough to store a letter of the alphabet or a small number?

Short Answer

Expert verified
Answer: 1 byte

Step by step solution

01

Understand the character encoding

First, we need to choose a character encoding to represent the letters of the alphabet or small numbers. Common character encoding standards include ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) and Unicode. ASCII uses 7 bits to represent characters from the English alphabet, while Unicode supports a wide range of characters, including those from other languages, and it uses multiple encoding forms (e.g., UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32). In this exercise, we will use ASCII encoding as it is sufficient to represent letters of the alphabet and small numbers.
02

Calculate the memory requirements for ASCII encoding

Since ASCII uses 7 bits to represent a character, it has 2^7 = 128 different possible character values. However, computers typically use 8 bits (1 byte) to store an ASCII character, even though the 8th bit is not used to represent the character. Therefore, the amount of memory needed to store a letter of the alphabet or a small number using ASCII encoding is 1 byte.

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