Sets, Records, and Unions

Abstract

The memory of a computer has little formal structure. Typically, it consists of a large number of identical cells. On most modern computers, each cell contains eight bits and is called abyte. Some supercomputers have memories with a larger cell size, such as 2, 4, or 8 bytes. Whatever the cell size, each byte may contain a meaningful value, such as a character, or it may be part of a larger entity, such as a real number or a string.