Can computers process numbers faster and more efficiently than alphanumeric character data three reasons why?

Answer 1

Computers cannot process anything but binary numbers. Even character strings are just arrays of whole numbers (character codes), so there is absolutely no difference in the processing speed of an array of integers and an array of characters. While the type of operations you will perform on strings are quite a bit different to the arithmetical operations you will perform with numeric data, as far as the computer is concerned there is no difference at all. It's all numeric so there's no difference in terms of processing speed.

There is, however, a key difference when it comes to displaying the data in a human-readable form. Displaying a character is simply a matter of emitting the character code which maps directly to a corresponding glyph, such as a bitmap. But converting a binary value to a decimal value requires that each decimal digit be determined before it can be mapped to its corresponding raster. This clearly requires additional processing.

The same can also be said of floating point values which require dedicated floating point co-processors to ease the burden. Integer arithmetic is simple by comparison.

So, while there is little difference in terms of actual processing, there are differences when it comes to displaying the results. In that sense alone, character data can be dealt with more efficiently than numeric data.

However, if character data is used to represent numeric data, such as the string "123.45", then numeric data is far more efficient because the string must be converted to and from an actual numeric value, whereas the numeric value does not.