Code and Related Topics

Partial map of the Internet, with nodes representing IP addresses

Information

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That portion of the content of a signal or message which conveys meaning.

Galactic (including dark) matter distribution in a cubic section of the Universe

Information embedded in an abstract mathematical object with symmetry breaking nucleus

$Visual representation of a strange attractor, with converted data of its fractal structure$

Information can be encoded into various forms for transmission and interpretation (for example, information may be encoded into a sequence of signs, or transmitted via a signal).

Data

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Collection of discrete units of information in a conceptual model that in their most basic forms convey quantity, quality, fact, statistics, or other basic units of meaning.

Adrien Auzout's "A TABLE of the Apertures of Object-Glasses" from a 1665 article in Philosophical Transactions

Data, as a general concept, refers to the fact that some existing information or knowledge is represented or coded in some form suitable for better usage or processing.

Language

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Structured system of communication.

William Jones discovered the family relation between Latin and Sanskrit, laying the ground for the discipline of historical linguistics.

Ferdinand de Saussure developed the structuralist approach to studying language.

Noam Chomsky is one of the most important linguistic theorists of the 20th century.

Language Areas of the brain. The Angular Gyrus is represented in orange, Supramarginal Gyrus is represented in yellow, Broca's area is represented in blue, Wernicke's area is represented in green, and the Primary Auditory Cortex is represented in pink.

In addition to word classes, a sentence can be analyzed in terms of grammatical functions: "The cat" is the subject of the phrase, "on the mat" is a locative phrase, and "sat" is the core of the predicate.

Wall of Love on Montmartre in Paris: "I love you" in 250 languages, by calligraphist Fédéric Baron and artist Claire Kito (2000)

A lesson at Kituwah Academy, a school where English and the Cherokee language are mediums of instruction

Arnold Lakhovsky, The Conversation (c. 1935)

An inscription of Swampy Cree using Canadian Aboriginal syllabics, an abugida developed by Christian missionaries for Indigenous Canadian languages

The first page of the poem Beowulf, written in Old English in the early medieval period (800–1100 AD). Although Old English is the direct ancestor of modern English, it is unintelligible to contemporary English speakers.

Multi-lingual sign outside the mayor's office in Novi Sad, written in the four official languages of the city: Serbian, Hungarian, Slovak, and Pannonian Rusyn

Principal language families of the world (and in some cases geographic groups of families). For greater detail, see Distribution of languages in the world.

Together, the eight countries in red contain more than 50% of the world's languages. The areas in blue are the most linguistically diverse in the world, and the locations of most of the world's endangered languages.

The word is sometimes used to refer to codes, ciphers, and other kinds of artificially constructed communication systems such as formally defined computer languages used for computer programming.

A replica of one of Chappe's semaphore towers in Nalbach, Germany

Optical telegraph

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Line of stations, typically towers, for the purpose of conveying textual information by means of visual signals.

Illustration of signalling by semaphore in 18th-century France. The operators would move the semaphore arms to successive positions to spell out text messages in semaphore code, and the people in the next tower would read them.

Illustration showing Robert Hooke's proposed system. At top are various symbols that might be used; ABCE indicates the frame, and D the screen behind which each of the symbols are hidden when not in use.

Sir Richard Lovell Edgeworth's proposed optical telegraph for use in Ireland. The rotational position of each one of the four indicators represented a number 1-7 (0 being "rest"), forming a four-digit number. The number stood for a particular word in a codebook.

19th-century demonstration of the semaphore

A Chappe semaphore tower near Saverne, France

A replica of an optical telegraph in Stockholm, Sweden

Diagram of UK Murray six-shutter system, with shutter 6 in the horizontal position, and shutters 1–5 vertical

St. Albans High Street in 1807, showing the shutter telegraph on top of the city's Clock Tower. It was on the London to Great Yarmouth line.

Ta' Kenuna Tower, a semaphore tower in Nadur, Gozo, Malta, built by the British in 1848

The Semaphore Tower at Khatirbazar, Andul in Howrah district of West Bengal

A restored two-arm semaphore post at Low Head in Tasmania

The vane positions indicate code numbers

Optical telegraph in the harbour of Bremerhaven, Germany

Former optical telegraph tower on the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg, Russia

A cartoon strip of "Monsieur Pencil" (1831) by Rodolphe Töpffer

To speed up transmission and to provide some semblance of security, a code book was developed for use with semaphore lines.

ISBN

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Numeric commercial book identifier that is intended to be unique.

The parts of a 10-digit ISBN and the corresponding EAN‑13 and barcode. Note the different check digits in each. The part of the EAN‑13 labeled "EAN" is the Bookland country code.

The Standard Book Number (SBN) is a commercial system using nine-digit code numbers to identify books.

First of 20 pages of commercial telegraph code from a 1910 radiator catalog

Commercial code (communications)

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In telecommunication, a commercial code is a code once used to save on cablegram costs.

Unicode

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Information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems.

Many modern applications can render a substantial subset of the many scripts in Unicode, as demonstrated by this screenshot from the OpenOffice.org application.

Various Cyrillic characters shown with upright, oblique and italic alternate forms

The Unicode Standard, however, includes more than just the base code. Alongside the character encodings, the Consortium's official publication includes a wide variety of details about the scripts and how to display them: normalization rules, decomposition, collation, rendering, and bidirectional text display order for multilingual texts, and so on.

Braille

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Tactile writing system used by people who are visually impaired, including people who are blind, deafblind or who have low vision.

Silver wedding bands with names Henri(que) and Tita written in braille

Lucy Sergent, 26-year-old daughter of a Kentucky coal miner, writing with a slate and stylus in 1946. Blind from birth, she attended the Kentucky School for the Blind for 11 years.

Georgia Academy for the Blind has been providing braille education and braille literacy since 1876.

Braille on a box of tablets. The raised Braille reads 'plavix'.

Braille book and the same book in inkprint

Braille plate at Duftrosengarten in Rapperswil, Switzerland

A bottle of Chapoutier wine, with braille on the label

An embossed map of a German train station, with braille text

Braille was based on a tactile code, now known as night writing, developed by Charles Barbier.

Charles Babbage, sometimes referred to as the "father of computing".

Computer science

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Study of computation, automation, and information.

Ada Lovelace published the first algorithm intended for processing on a computer.

Coding theory is the study of the properties of codes (systems for converting information from one form to another) and their fitness for a specific application.