[thechat] Binary Code of Computers

Luther, Ron Ron.Luther at hp.com
Tue May 7 08:40:01 CDT 2002


Hi Syed,

I'm really not sure where you are going with this, but there are a couple other things you might want to consider:

(1) You may have to look at your hardware and determine whether your machine saves information at the byte, gobble, or mouthful level so you know how big a chunk to consider at a time.

(2) You may have to look at your hardware and your operating file system to determine whether you are working with 'little-endian' or 'big-endian' data structures.  {The first letter of your name, (a capital "S"), is a decimal "83" in ASCII.  I *think* this may be stored as 0101 0011 on a 'big endian' machine and as 0011 0101 on a 'little endian' machine.}

(3) If you are looking at a raw stream of bits off some kind of stored media, you're going to need to understand how to differentiate between 'structure' and 'information'.  Is that "1" you just read a piece of the data file, a file attribute mark, a continuation pointer, a sector header, or a sector-track jump buffer?

... and of course ... Turning those bits back into information is a completely different kettle of fish!


Good Luck!

... and since this is pretty far removed from regular web junk ...

<tip type="Oracle date formatting" author="RonL.">

Oracle's "To_Char" function does a nice job of formatting dates as they are selected from the database.  This can save you a lot of pain [and quite a few lines of code] trying to convert dates into an odd format within your application:

e.g.:
"SELECT TO_CHAR(AL1.SHIP_DATE, 'MON-YY') FROM table"

</tip>


RonL.
(Who hasn't looked at things at this level since we used to 'flip bits' by banging two rocks together ...)    ;-)


-----Original Message-----
From: Syed Zeeshan Haider [mailto:szh at hotpop.com]

You are right. 0's and 1's are always there but our applications are
hiding them from us. This is like blood in a body. Blood is always there
but the body or skin is hiding it. We need a syringe to get the blood.
In the same way I want a software "syringe" which could reveal the 0's
and 1's in the files.



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