General > General Technical Chat
Why do people call an executable file (.exe) a binary file?
Masa:
Think about analog vs digital. All digital signals by nature are also analog signals. But it makes it much easier, when you can think on a higher level and ignore the details and the analog nature of the signal when it is not needed.
Usually on a computer it is important to know the file structure, because most files must be parsed / decoded to access and use the contents of the file. For this purpose, it is important to know precisely the structure of the file. By other words, you need to know more precisely than "it's a binary file", what file type it is, so that you know how to decode and parse it.
Executable files are one of the few files that rarely need to be parsed by other user programs. They are files that can be directly executed, hence it is not usually necessary to know the exact format of the file.
You usually can get away by calling them with such a general term as "a binary file".
You are correct, executable file is a much more informative name. Although there is also libraries which are not executable alone, there is executable's that are not executable on the same machine, there is "executable's" that are not directly executable, instead they are some kind of byte code that is compiled at the run time. Sometimes when you don't care about these details, you can generalize these as binary files as opposed to your source code, project and make files that are most likely text files.
james_s:
--- Quote from: m98 on April 26, 2020, 12:30:53 pm ---
--- Quote from: magic on April 26, 2020, 06:44:20 am ---I gather the number in your nick is your year of birth :P
This made up word didn't even exist when most of us started using computers :D
--- End quote ---
Well, you could protest the change using your senior citizen bonus, or simply accept that it has become an international standard.
Seriously, what kind of an discussion is this.
--- End quote ---
You brought it up.
I'd never heard "kibi" before until this thread, I've never heard anyone mention "kibibytes", IMHO it sounds stupid and pedantic. Everyone knows that a kilobyte is 1024 bytes, it's only the stupid hard drive marketing that has ever claimed otherwise.
magic:
--- Quote from: m98 on April 26, 2020, 12:30:53 pm ---Seriously, what kind of an discussion is this.
--- End quote ---
In this thread we rant about widely accepted confusing terminology and about those who rant about widely accepted confusing terminology.
:popcorn:
--- Quote from: james_s on April 26, 2020, 06:06:59 pm ---I'd never heard "kibi" before until this thread, I've never heard anyone mention "kibibytes", IMHO it sounds stupid and pedantic.
--- End quote ---
No. As the guy points out, this pedantry has made its way into various standards and the UI of at least one notable operating system, one catering primarily to people who would never figure out the old kilobyte :P It may have been adopted by the other operating system too by now. HDD flash manufacturers won :scared:
DimitriP:
--- Quote --- this pedantry has made its way into various standards
--- End quote ---
So we shouldn't talk about monitor sizing then ... :-DD
NivagSwerdna:
--- Quote from: LeoTech on April 25, 2020, 10:47:11 am ---the .exe file is often referred to as a binary file.
--- End quote ---
This thread is long and I haven't read it :) ... but to the OPs original point...
My interpretation is this terminology comes from the classification of files in the context of systems that manipulate files... e.g. Version Control Systems. A "source" file is some human generated content that is used as an input into some build system and typically would have lines which are terminated with an O/S dependent line ending and a character encoding either explicit or implied. These source files are held in a version control system (sccs, vcs, git whatever) in a potentially O/S agnostic way and returned to the user with an interpretation they require. On the other hand there are files that are not interpret-able in that sense and should be held in a bit for bit representation with no jiggery pokery. Examples of binary files would be images, executables, libraries etc.
So executables are binaries. Binaries are executables, images, etc...
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