Like I get that it can be a 1 or a 0, and that stores information, but how do you get information out of that? And how do people code with it? Seems like all it could store is numbers
Edit: Thank you all, this is very helpful
In: Technology
People do not in general code in binary, it is extremely hard for humans to read.
The CPU is built so it interprets binary data as instruction in a specific way and will start to do that at a specific memory adress when powered on. It is a table where for example if the finest 8 bits are 0000 0001 it should move data from locations specified in the following bits. It not that different to if you read “turn on the oven” it is not text but induction to do a specific tasks, because you know the meaning of those letters
You could write an induction as 01001000 10001001 11100101 if you like. This is a machine, what the CPU understand. Every induction to the CPU is like this. It is build to interpret what it should do from it.
An alternative is written in hexadecimal where 4 bits are on digits from 0 to 15. 10 to 15 use A to F as digits.
In hexadecimal the same thing is 48 89 e5
That is still hard for humans to read, there are a human-readable form called assembly and it in the induction is
mov rbp, rsp
rbp and rsp are registers and the insoction moves (copies) the content in rsp into rbp. There is a 1 to 1 mapping between assembly and machine code in hex or decimal.
You could look it all up in a table but is is simpler to let a computer program do that and output it in a more human-readable form.
Assembly code to make it easier to read from humans first appeared in 1947, the first assemblers that covert it automatically is from early 1950. So even when the number of computers in the works likely could be counted on your fingers people found a way to get away from programing in binary,
Assembly is sometimes used but most of the time higher-level languages are use that convert it to machine code. This is done by a compiler.
An example is a simple hello world in C that looks like
#include <stdio.h>
int main() {
// printf() displays the string inside quotation
printf(“Hello, World!”);
return 0;
}
It can be compiled to the following assembly code
push QWORD PTR [rip+0x2fca] # 403ff0 <_GLOBAL_OFFSET_TABLE_+0x8>
jmp QWORD PTR [rip+0x2fcc] # 403ff8 <_GLOBAL_OFFSET_TABLE_+0x10>
nop DWORD PTR [rax+0x0]
main:
push rbp
mov rbp,rsp
mov edi,0x402004
mov eax,0x0
call 401030 <printf@plt>
mov eax,0x0
pop rbp
ret
If you compile the C code yourself at [https://godbolt.org/](https://godbolt.org/) you can see the machine code in Hexadecimal too.
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