Computers can only deal with on/off values, which are thought of as ones and zeroes. To get past that limitation, computer scientists have dreamed up a bunch of translation schemes so that other kinds of information can be stored as well. Here's the problem: How does the computer know what kind of value it is dealing with? If you could look at the computer's memory, you could only see ones and zeroes. It would be impossible to tell if those values were parts of characters or numbers. This is the key fact to remember: computers track different kinds of information in different ways! Sometimes you will run into problems because of this fact.