Question

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

Short answer

Answer: 1 byte

Step-by-step solution

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.

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.