Question

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

Short answer

Answer: In both ASCII and UTF-8 encoding schemes, 8 bits (1 byte) of memory are required to store a letter of the alphabet or a small number.

Step-by-step solution

Introduction to Text Encoding Schemes

There are different ways to represent letters, numbers, and other printable symbols in a computer's memory or storage. Two widely known character encoding schemes for understanding the memory requirement are: 1. ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) 2. Unicode

ASCII Encoding Scheme

ASCII is a character encoding standard for representing text. It uses 7 bits to uniquely represent a letter (A-Z, uppercase and lowercase), digit (0-9), or a small set of special characters (punctuation, control codes, etc.). Since 7 bits can represent 2^7 or 128 different characters, ASCII is sufficient for encoding only the English alphabet, digits, and the essential special characters. Remember, a byte consists of 8 bits. So, in ASCII, it takes \( \lceil\frac{7}{8}\rceil = 1 \) byte to store each character.

Unicode Encoding Scheme

As ASCII is limited to 128 characters, it is insufficient for encoding the vast range of characters used in various languages and scripts worldwide. Unicode is a universal character encoding standard that uses more bits (16, 24 or 32) to store a larger range of characters. However, for just storing the English alphabet and small numbers, you don't need the full range of Unicode storage. One popular way of encoding Unicode is through UTF-8. UTF-8 is a variable-length encoding standard, in which: 1. ASCII characters (including English letters and digits) are still represented using 1 byte (8 bits). 2. Other characters can use 2 to 4 bytes, depending on the complexity of the character.

Conclusion

To store a letter of the alphabet or a small number, in both ASCII and UTF-8 encoding schemes, you need 1 byte (8 bits) of memory.