Here is a decent analogy I read: >Suppose we have a computer program which makes books. All of the commands which tell your computer program how to write a boo

Here is a decent analogy I read: >Suppose we have a computer program which makes books. All of the commands which tell your computer program how to write a book are stored as sequences of 0's and 1's. Also, all of the letters, punctuation marks, and formatting symbols (line break, indent etc) are stored as specific sequences of 0's and 1's. The commands which control the computer program and the actual text of the book are both stored in the same file. Up until now, we thought that these were placed side by side in the file, so you would have a segment saying "at 6am every day, print the following text in 12 pt font, and bind it in a hard red cover", followed by a text containing segment, and then another command segment saying "when you finish, print a copy of the book 134 positions further along in the file. We thought this was the case because we have known the sequences of 0's and 1's that stand for each letter for a long time now. When we looked at a file and attempted to interpret it as If it all stood for letters which made up words' we would see something like "fffffgfgy6- fsjjjjjj the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.bttt68-%jjjjjjfffffffff". After a while, we learned that the 'gibberish' segments were actually full of meaningful statements, but they were in a different language and contained the commands for the program. Now getting to today's article, this group has found that inside those sections which code for the actual text of the book, there are some commands that run the program. This is accomplished because there is more than one way to write most of the letters. As an example, you could have one segment of text which says "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times", and another segment which says "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" and also tells the book program to bind the book in gold leaf. And the only difference between the two is that the first one wrote the 's' in 'best' as 00010110, and the second one wrote it as 00010111.