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>Furthermore, if that's a revelation of some sort... There's no "display text" or "paint monster" instructions down there. Ouch. It wasn't. A little painful th

by jere 14y ago

>Furthermore, if that's a revelation of some sort... There's no "display text" or "paint monster" instructions down there. Ouch. It wasn't. A little painful though after having studied computer engineering and even recently writing games in DCPU-16. But anyway I will agree with most of what you said. The coolest part for me was always learning that there really was no magic underlying computers. >Not "considered"... is. My point is that everything in the computer being a number (large pieces of data being a single number) is just one of many interpretations and not a necessarily typical or useful one. At bottom, everything in the computer is actually some configuration of electrons. But it's not very useful to work conceptually at the level either.

jerf 14y ago
Sorry, didn't mean that targeted at your directly. I meant in general, for the reader. "At bottom, everything in the computer is actually some configuration of electrons. But it's not very useful to work conceptually at the level either." And actually part of my point is that it is all of those things, at once. It's electrons and it's all just numbers and it's text, too. It's not really some of them but really not other things, it's all of them all at once.
- aaronblohowiak 14y ago
  risking getting too deep in the mud, saying things are all of them at once is not correct. You can treat most sections of memory as executable, numerical, textual or otherwise, but that does not make them so. For instance, control code points in ASCII are not text, they are an in-band control mechanism. NULL is not text; not in the way most people's working definitions of text would implicate. The fact that there are abstractions upon binary sequences are matters of convention and occasionally hardware implementation. Teaching that there are meaningful layers of abstraction is part of having a consistent (sound) understanding of the computer.
  - jerf 14y ago
    I did not mean everything is text; take it as everything is electrons, numbers, and text/pictures/video/emails/etc., and a other layers too. There's no "right" or "true" abstraction layer, they're all true. Not necessarily the same kind of true in absolutely every case, but there's no "true" true here, where one can dismiss some layer or other as not important. The forest and the trees are both true.

by jere 14y ago

jerf 14y ago

Sorry, didn't mean that targeted at your directly. I meant in general, for the reader. "At bottom, everything in the computer is actually some configuration of electrons. But it's not very useful to work conceptually at the level either." And actually part of my point is that it is all of those things, at once. It's electrons and it's all just numbers and it's text, too. It's not really some of them but really not other things, it's all of them all at once.

aaronblohowiak 14y ago
risking getting too deep in the mud, saying things are all of them at once is not correct. You can treat most sections of memory as executable, numerical, textual or otherwise, but that does not make them so. For instance, control code points in ASCII are not text, they are an in-band control mechanism. NULL is not text; not in the way most people's working definitions of text would implicate. The fact that there are abstractions upon binary sequences are matters of convention and occasionally hardware implementation. Teaching that there are meaningful layers of abstraction is part of having a consistent (sound) understanding of the computer.
- jerf 14y ago
  I did not mean everything is text; take it as everything is electrons, numbers, and text/pictures/video/emails/etc., and a other layers too. There's no "right" or "true" abstraction layer, they're all true. Not necessarily the same kind of true in absolutely every case, but there's no "true" true here, where one can dismiss some layer or other as not important. The forest and the trees are both true.