13

I heard computers use binary. My question is about computers, so I tagged it "binary".

8
  • 3
    In some cased "binary" probably refers to [executable]
    – slhck
    Oct 10, 2014 at 12:42
  • @slhck: …which is also a horrible tag IMHO Oct 10, 2014 at 12:47
  • 1
    Been there, done that.
    – slhck
    Oct 10, 2014 at 12:48
  • @slhck: Heh, nice. Oct 10, 2014 at 13:04
  • 1
    Add [executable-binary] or [native-executable-binary]?
    – 174140
    Oct 13, 2014 at 21:25
  • @galegosimpatico: I don't see how they would be useful. But they're better than [binary], sure. Oct 14, 2014 at 8:12
  • 3
    Questions tend to be binary. They are either answerable, or not.
    – user
    Oct 15, 2014 at 14:52
  • 1
    It's thinking of linkage, [static-executable-binary] and [dynamic-executable-binary], however they must be enough documented in Stack Overflow and are topics indeed very well documented outside SE.
    – 174140
    Oct 15, 2014 at 18:46

3 Answers 3

0

No questions tagged left!

There were a handful which actually pertained to binary in the sense of "How do I represent 256 in binary"; and others relating to hex-to-decimal conversion which needed retagged.

1

My guess is that "binary" (a bunch of bytes--period) is in contrast to something such as "plain-text" (a bunch of bytes representing plain characters in a particular character encoding). I believe all files and communication streams would fall into one of those two, although technically a text file is just a particular kind of binary file.

You do have to know the encoding of the plain-text file (legacy cp1252, unicode utf8, etc.), or auto-detect it, as most web browsers try to do.

In other words, if opening it in Notepad shows gobbledegook, it's binary,or you picked the wrong encoding/font.

1
  • 1
    Right, but what's the point of having it as a tag? Oct 21, 2014 at 18:33
0

may not be required, but maybe what we want is , it gives the added advantage of too. And sound more aesthetic than . I've just gone plain mad.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .