The activity of converting from plain text into code; SYN. encryption.
1. See Huffman coding.
2. A method of dealing with computers with Year 2000 problems that entails storing a four-digit year in date fields designed to hold only two digits in a program or system. This can be accomplished by using the bits associated with the date field more efficiently—for example, by converting the date field from ASCII to binary or from decimal to hexadecimal, both of which allow storage of larger values.