3.5 Digital things
The terms ‘discrete’ and ‘digital’ are often used interchangeably. For example, The New Penguin Dictionary of Computing contains the following definition.
Digital. Any communication or computing technology whose data may only have a finite number of discrete values.
However, I want you to be clear about the strong association between a digital thing and a number. So let's now look a bit more closely at the interior world of the computer. It is a discrete world. But, more precisely, it is a digital world, a world of numbers.