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by falcor84 1403 days ago
> 1 and 0 are common representations for true and false in computer science

Long before standing for true or false, 1 and 0 have stood for the presence or absence of something arbitrary, so I don't see any issue here.

3 comments

Just 1s and 0s don’t really do anything useful before we agree on some conventions, such as

- byte and word size,

- endianness,

- semantics of what means what in a string of bits (think Two’s Complement, IEEE 754, ASCII, ISO-8859-1, Shift-JIS, Unicode),

- what it means to do certain operations on bits (Boolean algebra),

- how different binary operations can be constructed from transistors / logic gates (ALU design),

- how information can be retained in and recalled from memory (basically just flip-flops),

- how said memory is laid out with respect to internal/external devices and program regions (conventions!)

- how said memory can be addressed, and how information can be transferred between CPU and memory (bus architectures),

- how the computer architecture can be programmed to do things (processor instruction sets),

- and whatever I forgot just now…

And then some people design and build trinary computers, imagine that.

In fact, if we consider the presence or absence of truth in a statement...

(There is no completion. The trailing off is intended.)

Turing, u here?