well i got mixed up !!! wait a minute , if its not conversion from decimal to octal and vice versa, how does the oct do the magic? it just gives me a number that is not the previous one any more, i mean , when i enter 10 as decimal , ( here i am the only one who knows the base , ) and when i use oct. teh output number will be 12 , which is to me an octal number in integer! so then it would be stored in memory just like "001 010" representing an octal value( i think). am i right?! so what do we call this process, ? we do arithmatics on these figures i mean scintific stuff works in different bases, so if this is not conversion , what is it?, !i mean , you know , well from what you ve mentioned, i gather, to the system teh binary matters, ! no octal or decimal or stuff. , when we are explicitly working with octal and stff, system works with binary anyway, but it represents as if it is octal! is it right?!!? ( exteremly confused! sorry for being stupid! i just dont understand!)