Thread: Binary Help

I've been learning the architecture of computers, from the software to the hardware, and practically everything else that is used by a computer. So ofcourse, I quickly came across "Binary" numbers. I learned how to convert binary, add it, subtract, divide it, convert binary to decimal, and decimal to binary. But my question is... what can I do with this on today's computers??? From just being able to say "I know how to change the letter A, into "01000001", I feel like a pro, haha. But just knowing how to convert text and numbers into binary, and vice versa, isn't enough, I know that. I want to know what I can do with it? Is assembly language, binary? Or something very similiar? Is there some sort of "compilier" that I can send commands to my computer, using binary?

Sorry if my question seems dumb... I'm just still really new to this stuff.

Originally Posted by oogabooga

This is not a Windows-specific question. If I was you I'd post it on the C forum where more people will see it.

Oh okay, thank you!

Well, since you haven't posted in the right place yet, why not answer some questions before mods move this?

> Is assembly language, binary?
Sort of. Assembly instructions get translated directly to machine code (which is a long series of unreadable hex octets), and this gets converted to binary for the CPU/FPU/whatever else to process.

> Is there some sort of "compilier" that I can send commands to my computer, using binary?
Again, sort of. You do this by passing the commands with inline assembly. From there, it's converted down to binary and sent to process. If you want to know what actual binary commands are being sent, here's an (extensive) opcode reference chart: geek64-abc edition | X86 Opcode and Instruction Reference 1.11

And if you want to do this in C, here's how (an example of swapping two ints without xchgq):

Code:

int v1 = 1;
int v2 = 3;

asm volatile (
                   "movq %%rax, %%rcx\n"
                   "movq %%rbx, %%rax\n"
                   "movq %%rcx, %%rbx\n"
                   : "=a" (v1), "=b" (v2)
                   : "a" (v1), "b" (v2)
                   : "rcx"
                   );

Thanks guys for the informative information! I really appreciate it! And sorry about not moving this yesterday, I was on the computer for like 5 minutes before I had to go. I'll go post this question where it should!