Unicode Characters and Strings | 3rd | week 1 |.
hello world. It'd be nice if that was super simple. In 1970, it was simple because there was pretty much one character set. Even in 1970, when I started, we didn't even have a lowercase characters. We just had uppercase characters, and I'll tell you we were happy when we just had uppercase characters. You kids these days with your lowercase characters, and numbers, and slashes, and stuff. So, the problem that computers have is they have to come up with a way, I mean, computers don't understand letters actually what computers understand his numbers. So, we had to come up with a mapping between letters and numbers. So, we came up with a mapping, and there's been many mappings historically. The one that is the most common mapping of the 1980s, is this mapping called ASCII, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange and it says basically this number equals this letter. So for example, the number for Hello World, for capital H the number is 72. Somebody just decided that the capital H was going to be 72 lowercase e, number is 101 and new line is 10. So if you were really and truly going to look at what was going on inside the computer, it's storing these numbers but the problem is, is there are 128 of these, which means that you can't put every character into a 0-128. So, in the early days, we just dealt with whatever characters are possible. Like I said, when I started you could only do uppercase, you couldn't even do lowercase.