Data (computer science)

Data representing quantities, characters, or symbols on which operations are performed by a computer are stored and recorded on magnetic, optical, electronic, or mechanical recording media, and transmitted in the form of digital electrical or optical signals.

Physical computer memory elements consist of an address and a byte/word of data storage.

Data relating to physical events or processes will have a temporal component.

A program is data in the form of coded instructions to control the operation of a computer or other machine.

[2] In the nominal case, the program, as executed by the computer, will consist of machine code.

The elements of storage manipulated by the program, but not actually executed by the central processing unit (CPU), are also data.

The input data to an interpreter is itself a program, just not one expressed in native machine language.

For example, a user might first instruct the operating system to load a word processor program from one file, and then use the running program to open and edit a document stored in another file.

The algorithms used by the spell checker to suggest corrections would be either machine code data or text in some interpretable programming language.

[3] The total amount of digital data in 2007 was estimated to be 281 billion gigabytes (281 exabytes).

[citation needed] Data can be represented in computers in multiple ways, as per the following examples: It is only after instantiation that an object of a specified class exists.