Thread: Reading binary files

That is, of course, how you want to interpret it. Obviously all data is stored in 0 and 1, because of how electronics work, but generally, everything "higher" then the hardware works in decimals, mostly base 10 or 16.

Originally Posted by Elysia

That is, of course, how you want to interpret it. Obviously all data is stored in 0 and 1, because of how electronics work, but generally, everything "higher" then the hardware works in decimals, mostly base 10 or 16.

You've completely lost me here. All digital electronics, with 0.01% exceptions [such as multilevel flash memory] works with the principle of two levels of input, and two levels of output. It is binary, all the way throug. It may be stored in lumps of 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 1024, or less often 3, 7, 24 or some other number of binary digits (bits) together. Occassionally, groups of 4 can be directly translated to "hex", but it's still 4 bits that just happen to mach base 16.

--
Mats

That pretty much sums it up. When "working" with raw data, all we "see" is numbers, not digits. Perhaps that's clearer. Though it still hides the underlying concept.

Originally Posted by Elysia

That pretty much sums it up. When "working" with raw data, all we "see" is numbers, not digits. Perhaps that's clearer. Though it still hides the underlying concept.

Sure, working with binary streams of numbers becomes very unpractical very soon, so representing those binary streams with something more human readable and managable is a good idea. It's much easier to remember/deal with 0x1267 (hex), 011147 (octal) or 4711 (decimal) than it is to remember 0001001001100111. Or to deal with 'a' than 0x61 (hex), 0141 (octal), 97 (decimal), or 01100001. But they are all the same binary form inside the machine - we just represent the sequence of bits in various ways to make it more readable.

And MOV EAX, ECX is much easier to read than 0x89 0xC8 [or 10001001 11001000 as the processor sees it].

--
Mats