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Re: Is binary a "language"?

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spinoza1111 <spinoza1111@yahoo.com> writes:

> On Apr 12, 10:33 pm, "Pascal J. Bourguignon" <p...@informatimago.com>
> wrote:
>> spinoza1111<spinoza1...@yahoo.com> writes:
>> > You missed the point at which it was clear that binary is an adjective
>> > and not a noun, Mijn Heer. "I program using binary" needs to be
>> > rewritten in "normal form" as "I program using binary machine
>> > language". The word "binary" adds information since historically, not
>> > all machine languages were binary. Decimal computers were programmed
>> > by way of 6-bit codes in decimal machine language.
>>
>> So were they decimal or binary???
>>
>> Decimal computers used electronic tubes with ten states.
>>
>> Russians developed ternary computers where three electronic states were
>> used.
>>
>> If you have only two states, then it's binary.
>>
>> Since decimal arithmetic has the advantage of being the one human
>> usually use, it was simulated on binary computers (destined to
>> business applications), by encoding one decimal digit into FOUR bits,
>> not six.  
>
> The IBM 1401 was "decimal" because at the level of machine language
> the basic unit of information was 6 bits, and a subset of the 64
> characters took part in math that was based on electronic table
> lookup.

Yes, but while the 1401 was a decimal computer, its hardware was
binary: it used groups of bits to store the decimal digits.


> However, each character had an extrabit called the word mark which
> delimited operands which were fully variable length. You could for
> this reason do extra precision calculation without special
> programming. In response to an article in the Journal of Symbolic
> Logic, I wrote a very simple program to calculate and print the exact
> value of 100! in decimal. This is easy today but somewhat rare in
> 1973, so, the printout became part of the math department's incunabula
> and curio collection for a number of years.
>
> However, after programming the 1401 for a few years, I realized that
> through an interpreter it could be fully binary. You could even use
> the word mark effectively increasing the size of its memory.

That's why the question is unimportant.  Thanks to Turing and the
equivalence of Universal Turing Machines, we know that we can always
implement a different processor as a virtual machine.

-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                     http://www.informatimago.com/
A bad day in () is better than a good day in {}.

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Re: Is binary a "language"? spinoza1111 <spinoza1111@yahoo.com> - 2011-04-12 05:57 -0700
  Re: Is binary a "language"? "Pascal J. Bourguignon" <pjb@informatimago.com> - 2011-04-12 16:33 +0200
    Re: Is binary a "language"? "osmium" <r124c4u102@comcast.net> - 2011-04-12 09:46 -0500
      Re: Is binary a "language"? "Pascal J. Bourguignon" <pjb@informatimago.com> - 2011-04-12 17:00 +0200
        Re: Is binary a "language"? "osmium" <r124c4u102@comcast.net> - 2011-04-12 10:11 -0500
        Re: Is binary a "language"? spinoza1111 <spinoza1111@yahoo.com> - 2011-04-15 06:07 -0700
          Re: Is binary a "language"? "BartC" <bc@freeuk.com> - 2011-04-15 14:40 +0100
            Re: Is binary a "language"? spinoza1111 <spinoza1111@yahoo.com> - 2011-04-16 06:58 -0700
          Re: Is binary a "language"? "Pascal J. Bourguignon" <pjb@informatimago.com> - 2011-04-15 19:23 +0200
            Re: Is binary a "language"? spinoza1111 <spinoza1111@yahoo.com> - 2011-04-16 07:19 -0700
              Re: Is binary a "language"? "Pascal J. Bourguignon" <pjb@informatimago.com> - 2011-04-17 02:30 +0200
        Re: Is binary a "language"? Thad Smith <ThadSmith@acm.org> - 2011-04-24 15:37 -0700
      Re: Is binary a "language"? spinoza1111 <spinoza1111@yahoo.com> - 2011-04-15 06:01 -0700
    Re: Is binary a "language"? spinoza1111 <spinoza1111@yahoo.com> - 2011-04-15 05:40 -0700
      Re: Is binary a "language"? "Pascal J. Bourguignon" <pjb@informatimago.com> - 2011-04-15 19:12 +0200
        Re: Is binary a "language"? spinoza1111 <spinoza1111@yahoo.com> - 2011-04-16 07:15 -0700

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