The Art of Assembly Language

Overview

Although computers are famous for their 'number- crunching ' capabilities, the truth is that most computer systems process character data far more often than numbers . Given the importance of character manipulation in modern software, a thorough understanding of character and string data is necessary if you're going to write great code.

The term character refers to a human or machine-readable symbol that is typically a nonnumeric entity. In general, a character is any symbol that you can type on a keyboard or display on a video display. Note that in addition to alphabetic characters , character data includes punctuation symbols, numeric digits, spaces, tabs, carriage returns (the ENTER key), other control characters, and other special symbols.

This chapter looks at how we represent characters, strings, and character sets within a computer system. This chapter also discusses various operations on these data types.