We can use an address to refer to any of several variously sized collections of bits starting at that address. It is possible to speak of the word at address 736424 or the byte at address 736427. To give meaning to memory at a given address, we must know the type of the value stored there. The type determines how many bits are used and how to interpret those bits. If the object at location 736424 has type float and if floats on this machine are stored in 32 bits, then we know that the object at that address spans the entire word. The value of that float depends on the details of how the machine stores floating-point numbers. Alternatively, if the object at location 736424 is an unsigned char on a machine using the ISO-Latin-1 character set, then the byte at that address represents a semicolon. |
011000111010100000001100110000111000011000011
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1010100000001100
we still don't know what it means. We need to know the type of the data to know what it means.- How is type responsible for our interpretation (does he mean by interpretation that we can translate machine level language (010101) into human readable language?) |
- How did he manage to find out what those bits represent (@last two sentences)? |