CS208 Introduction to Computer Systems
Wednesday, 24 September 2025

+ Questions?
- Suggestion: use #questions on Slack instead of DM
    it helps other people, and sometimes gets
    you answers even when I'm not available

+ Debugging lab 

+ Characters
- Memory: bytes with addresses
- What's a character?
    one letter or number or symbol
    used to form communications of meaning
    a, b, c, &, *, (, ,, 1, 2, 3, etc.
- Unicode
    - what's a codepoint?
        an agreed-upon integer that goes with one particular character
        e.g. U+00F1 goes with ñ
    - what's an encoding of a codepoint?
        a scheme for storing the codepoint of a character
- Character encodings
    - ASCII
        Each character gets one byte (but the leftmost bit is always 0)
        Only 2^7 = 128 characters are represented
    - ISO-8859-1 (also known as Latin-1)
        Each character gets one byte
        Superset of ASCII
        Only 191 characters are represented, but it coulda been 2^8 = 256
    - UTF-16LE
    - UTF-16BE
    - and...
- UTF-8

+ Saturday's assignment

+ Command-line arguments in C
- int main(int argc, char *argv[])
- args.c