RE: What is text?

If I may, computers, and dare I say computer scientists, only recognise bits and bytes. It’s humans, even if it’s only through the medium of programming, who impose some sort of order and meaning on those bits and bytes. There are people who do say something like, “I’ve a terabyte of information on (such and such) a topic ”. Bytes as information? Which encoding standards are being understood/enforced? Programmers read those bytes, or used to in earlier times, to find out where a program went wrong. I wonder how many of us do that nowadays. We haven’t got to the stage where those terabytes will be understood implicitly by everyone as, say, so many images or pages of text or whatever.

The notion that there are words or sentences or poetry in the computer is purely a fiction.

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