If digital data is stored in 0s & 1s, how does the reader know how many of the digits to take into consideration?

Question

Must be a very basic and dumb question. But ‘1001’ can be 9 and also 2 & 1 if ’10’ & ’01’ is taken seperately. I’m confused.

In: 49

Answer 1

At the absolute lowest level, it’s built into the architecture of the system – when we say a “32-bit” or “64-bit” processor or architecture, what we are saying is that the native instruction set is encoded in that number of bits, with a bit being a discrete 1 or 0 – in other data sets that don’t need that much, we will have code that defines the length of a piece of data.