Data is information. Computer programs need data to do anything useful. Data can take many forms (numbers, text, pictures, etc.), but ultimately, at a low enough level of abstraction, all data is numbers because that is what computers know how to store. It is an abstraction that makes it appear that we can store things more interesting than numbers, such as images, video, text, web pages, etc. These things are all just large collections of numbers interpreted in different ways — the different interpretations are abstractions! At an even lower level of abstraction, all data is just sequences of 0’s and 1’s, because computer hardware stores data as binary numbers using different electric voltages to represent the binary digits 0 and 1. Fortunately, computer programmers don’t have to work at such a low level of abstraction. In the rest of this section, we’ll look at the kinds of data we, as programmers, can use.