Writing in Binary

[kendulrich]

Hello All,

First off, If this is the wrong area, Please let me know. I've searched all other topics and feel my question is best suited here.

I've been confused on is that I understand that 256 Decimal is 100000000.

My question is that, am I suppose to write it as 100000000? or Since it goes into a second bit,  I guess is the way to say it, that it should be written as 0000000100000000?

Please let me know, and I'm sorry for the silly/newb question.

[DaveLembke]

1 Byte is 0-255, so 2 Bytes are needed to get the range of 256 - 65535

so

00000000 11111111 = 255

and

00000001 00000000 = 256

and

11111111 11111111 = 65535

[Salmon Trout]

Binary can be expressed using no more digits than needed. You would not write 0001000 in decimal if you meant one thousand. It is common to prefix a decimal number with a zero and a lower case b.



However if you are dealing with (for example) nibble, byte, word (4,8, or 16 bits) sized chunks of data you would pad with as many leading zeros as necessary e.g.:

Bit:     1
Nibble:  0101
Byte:    00000101
Word:    0000000000000101

[kendulrich]

Thank you for the clarification. I really appreciate it!