This article is part of the sequence The Basics You Won't Learn in the Basics aimed at eager people striving to gain a deeper understanding of programming and computer science.
In the past few weeks, we have discussed the different ways computers deal with binary numbers in order to represent the numbers we are used to see - positive, negative and real. This time, we will take a step back from diving in the details of how the hardware deals with such issues and focus on how the design decisions, taken by computer architects, affect the way we represent data in our code. Particularly, we shall explore the different "features" that data types, that we use in our code, have hidden for us. …Tag: binary
This article is part of the sequence The Basics You Won't Learn in the Basics aimed at eager people striving to gain a deeper understanding of programming and computer science.
Hey, it has been a while since I last wrote an article on these series. Last time, we covered negative binary numbers and the different ways of representing them in a computer. This time, we will explain how to deal with real numbers. More specifically, we will briefly discuss fixed point numbers and then we will move on to the core of this article - floating point numbers. …
This article is part of the sequence The Basics You Won't Learn in the Basics aimed at eager people striving to gain a deeper understanding of programming and computer science.
Computers store data using numbers and last time, we covered how they store positive numbers in binary. But our adventure will be incomplete if we don't present how to store negative numbers. This time, we will explore different variants of storing negative binary numbers and we shall see why do we store them that way. …
This article is part of the sequence The Basics You Won't Learn in the Basics aimed at eager people striving to gain a deeper understanding of programming and computer science.
Last time, we covered how does a processor work. We mentioned that he used instructions, which are encoded in numbers. But these numbers are stored in a computer in binary digits. Today, I begin a series on posts on how binary numbers work. …
