understanding that strings are different most aspiring developers (and even few who have written code for long timereally have hard time understanding that computers truly do only understand and even larger numbers are made up of and comparisons take place with and data is moved using and in shortstrings don' exist for the computer (and numbers just barely existalthough grouping and to make numbers is relatively easystrings are lot harder because now you're talking about information that the computer must manipulate as numbers but present as characters there are no strings in computer science strings are made up of charactersand individual characters are actually numeric values when you work with strings in pythonwhat you're really doing is creating an assembly of characters that the computer sees as numeric values that' why the following sections are so important they help you understand why strings are so special understanding this material will save you lot of headaches later defining character using numbers to create characteryou must first define relationship between that character and number more importanteveryone must agree that when certain number appears in an application and is viewed as character by that applicationthe number is translated into specific character one of the most common ways to perform this task is to use the american standard code for information interchange (asciipython uses ascii to translate the number to the letter the chart at shows the various numeric values and their character equivalents every character you use must have different numeric value assigned to it the letter uses value of to create lowercase ayou must assign different numberwhich is the computer views and as completely different characterseven though people view them as uppercase and lowercase versions of the same character the numeric values used in this are in decimal howeverthe computer still views them as and for examplethe letter is really the value and the letter is really the value when you see an onscreenthe computer sees binary value instead