2 ms·
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, text
by 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 agoI 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.