I heard computers use binary. My question is about computers, so I tagged it "binary".
asked Oct 10, 2014 at 12:02
3 Answers
No questions tagged binary 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.
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.
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1Right, but what's the point of having it as a tag?– Oliver Salzburg ModCommented Oct 21, 2014 at 18:33
binary may not be required, but maybe what we want is binary-execution, it gives the added advantage of executable too. And sound more aesthetic than executable-execution. I've just gone plain mad.
[executable][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.