5614 Posted December 5, 2004 Share Posted December 5, 2004 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'? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sayonara Posted December 6, 2004 Share Posted December 6, 2004 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.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
5614 Posted December 6, 2004 Author Share Posted December 6, 2004 so with a 32 bit proccessor... will each "word" be 32 bits long? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Posted December 7, 2004 Share Posted December 7, 2004 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. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
timo Posted December 7, 2004 Share Posted December 7, 2004 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 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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