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A discrete variable that can take only one state contains zero information, and 2 is the next natural number after 1. That is why the bit, a variable with only two possible values, is a standard primary unit of information. A collection of n bits may have 2 n states: see binary number for details.
Computer engineers often need to write out binary quantities, but in practice writing out a binary number such as 1001001101010001 is tedious and prone to errors. Therefore, binary quantities are written in a base-8, or "octal", or, much more commonly, a base-16, "hexadecimal" (hex), number format. In the decimal system, there are 10 digits, 0 ...
The base-2 numeral system is a positional notation with a radix of 2.Each digit is referred to as bit, or binary digit.Because of its straightforward implementation in digital electronic circuitry using logic gates, the binary system is used by almost all modern computers and computer-based devices, as a preferred system of use, over various other human techniques of communication, because of ...
Many modern CPUs provide limited support for decimal integers as an extended datatype, providing instructions for converting such values to and from binary values. Depending on the architecture, decimal integers may have fixed sizes (e.g., 7 decimal digits plus a sign fit into a 32-bit word), or may be variable-length (up to some maximum digit ...
Thus, only 10 bits of the significand appear in the memory format but the total precision is 11 bits. In IEEE 754 parlance, there are 10 bits of significand, but there are 11 bits of significand precision (log 10 (2 11) ≈ 3.311 decimal digits, or 4 digits ± slightly less than 5 units in the last place).
For other binary formats, the required number of decimal digits is [h] + ⌈ ⌉, where p is the number of significant bits in the binary format, e.g. 237 bits for binary256. When using a decimal floating-point format, the decimal representation will be preserved using:
The decimal number 0.15625 10 represented in binary is 0.00101 2 (that is, 1/8 + 1/32). (Subscripts indicate the number base .) Analogous to scientific notation , where numbers are written to have a single non-zero digit to the left of the decimal point, we rewrite this number so it has a single 1 bit to the left of the "binary point".
char * pc [10]; // array of 10 elements of 'pointer to char' char (* pa)[10]; // pointer to a 10-element array of char The element pc requires ten blocks of memory of the size of pointer to char (usually 40 or 80 bytes on common platforms), but element pa is only one pointer (size 4 or 8 bytes), and the data it refers to is an array of ten ...