Data are simply pieces of information, and an individual piece of information is a datum. Common usage, however, allows "data" as both the singular and plural form of the word. In the hardware of computers, data exists as bits and bytes stored as electronic memory. The function of a program or application (software) is to manipulate data. Each program formats data in a specific way that classifies a particular type of information. Humans learn to do this automatically and can easily distinguish between a number or a letter or what a percentage (%) character means. Computers, however, must be told what these data types mean within each programming language; therefore, the programmer has to declare the data type for every data object. Typical data types are numeric, alphanumeric (a mixture of alphabetic letters), numbers and special characters, dates, and logical (true/false) data...