eli5 How do people code with binary?

Question

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

Answer 1

at a high level:

> how do you get information out of that?

You define a way to interpret the 1s and 0s. For example, lets say you have the alphabet composed of 27 characters, and then some 37 other relevant characters.

The set of these 64 characters can be represented by 2^6, or 6 consecutive binary numbers.

000000

000001

000010

…

Given this, if we have say, 72 binary numbers we can interpret this into 12 characters by reading 6 binary numbers chunks sequentially and converting them. Now we can interpret the binary as “hello world!” for example.

Computers will have some definition of how to interpret this binary information and what to do with it.

> how do people code in binary?

In general, we dont. We use programming languages which can capture all the semantics and logic and information we want, in a format more parseable for a human being to read and write.

Then that programming language will be converted to something more useable by the computer, like for example to that binary we mentioned earlier.