The difference between chars, ints, shorts, longs, floats, and doubles is the amount of memory associated with each one and how it is interpreted. The hardware elements that are used for almost all computer memory have exactly two states - low voltage and high voltage. Each element of memory is used to represent one binary digit of information, called a bit The bits are organized physically into words . The number of bits in a word is dependent upon the details of the hardware, but is usually 16 or 32.
Physical memory is essentially one big list of words.
The address of a particular memory location is just it's position in the list. The position of a digit in a number indicates the power of 10 that it is multiplied by. Binary numbers are a natural representation for computers because of the two-state memory elements. Binary numbers are a natural representation for computers because of the two-state memory elements. Data Storage Computer memory is all bits.