I searched for similar questions here and none of them really gave the answer I’m looking for.
I understand we have the concept of encoding where in the ascii scheme, the letter A, for example, is encoded to 01000001, because humans agreed on this to be so, *but where actually is that A* when the binary calls for it, if physically in the cpu, for this example we just have 8 microscopic transistors, 2 holding a charge and 6 without a charge that we point to and say “That there means A…but it also means 65 in decimal”? Clearly there’s some level of abstraction here I’m not aware of.
Does 01000001 actually just correspond to a standardized pixel arrangement in the shape of A that is only actually rendered by the hardware in the situation where it’s called to be printed on a screen?
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For the number: 01000001 binary means 65 decimal, that’s just how it is. These two are the exact same number, represented in different notations.
Just like the 6 in 65 is worth 60, the leftmost 1 in 01000001 binary is worth 64, the rightmost is worth 1, so 01000001 binary is worth 65. Each spot you go left in binary is worth double the previous one, instead of ten times the previous one like it does in decimal. The computer never even has to convert from binary to decimal because the value is the same.
For the letter: 65 decimal meaning A in ASCII is, as you said, a standard people agreed on. The value by itself means nothing to the processor, it actually means more to people that know the ASCII table than it does to a processor.
Software needs to be written so that the value can be taken all the way from just a number to a letter being presented on your screen, what this software is like will change based on the device that is running the code, if it’s using a segmented display it will run some code to turn some bars on and others off, if it’s using a modern display the process will involve getting the data for the letter A, in whatever font it needs to be displayed in, and calculating what all of the pixels of that will look like, which often means a lot of math, since fonts nowadays are not even defined in pixels, they are defined mathematically so that they can be scaled to any size.
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