There are Many Data Types

You might be tempted say that the pattern 0000000000000000 represents "zero". But it doesn't necessarily. Even such an obvious pattern has no automatic meaning.

If you were told that the above pattern were of type short, then you would know that it represents the integer zero. Here is another pattern:

1111111110011001

As a short, this pattern represents -103 (negative one hundred three).

There are uncountably many types of data that can be represented in the memory of a computer. If specific patterns always had specific meanings, then only a few types of data could be represented. This would be much too restrictive. Many data types are invented by programmers as they write programs. Without this flexibility computers would be much less useful.

Not all machines use memory this way. A simple electronic calculator, for example, uses memory for one purpose only: to store floating point numbers. It uses only one data type, and can do only those few things with that data type that it has been wired to do. The engineers who designed the calculator decided how to represent numbers with bit strings, and then designed the electronics to work with just those strings. This is too restrictive for a general purpose computer.