How does a computer know to seperate the binary digits.

 

For example in this text:

 

hiya

 

there'd be the binary coding for "h" "i" "y" "a" but how does the computer know when to sepearte the 1s and 0s making H to start off and make I... like if "h" was 10101010 (made up, whatever!) and then I starts off with a 1, then how does the computer know that H is 10101010 and not 101010101 with the extra 1 on the end from the I... that new number (with the extra 1) could be another letter or something.

 

So how does a computer 'know'?

In assembler, a "Word" is 8 bits long.

 

(Or it used to be anyway; newer computers use 32 or 64 bits. But basically it's how many bits have been read.)

so with a 32 bit proccessor... will each "word" be 32 bits long?

As far as I'm aware, a word has always been 8 bits long. "32-bit" basically means that it can address RAM using 32-bits; i.e. the maximum amount of RAM you can address is with all 32 bits filled with 1's.

I´m not completely certain about the size of a "word".

However (from what I´ve learned): A Byte is 8 bits. An Integer (the data type called "int" or "integer" in most programming languages) is the size of a processor register which would be 32bit for today´s standards (though, 64bit processors are allready available). The latter would be what I´d consider a "word".

 

Dave´s statement is correct in the way that you need to load the memory adress in a register to address it. Hence, with 32bit registers you can address 2^32 bytes of memory.

 

EDIT: OH, and Dave: The max memory is one byte more than you said, because 0 is also a valid address