General > General Technical Chat

Why do people call an executable file (.exe) a binary file?

<< < (13/14) > >>

NivagSwerdna:

--- Quote from: james_s on April 27, 2020, 05:11:46 am ---The key to all of this is that language is an imprecise art form, certainly English is notorious, I can't comment on the nature of other languages.
--- End quote ---
Which leads to the great cryptic crosswords.   :)

tooki:

--- Quote from: LeoTech on April 25, 2020, 10:47:11 am ---Hello everybody,

This has been very confusing to me at times, and to be honest I do not get it.

Almost everywhere you go to download something - especially in the open source community - the .exe file is often referred to as a binary file.
This makes zero sense to me, every file on a computer is binary based, and solely calling a .exe file for binary is just stupid and uninformed.

Even wikipedia has the following to say about binary files: "A binary file is a computer file that is not a text file." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_file)
AFAIK, a text file is as binary as the browser in which I am typing right now.

As great as the internet is, this is just a stupid mistake that somebody once made and now everybody keeps repeating that.
Do any of you guys know a compelling argument for refering to these files as binary? Because if not, let's try to stop that misconception. And just call the exectables, which in my mind is a far more correct and usefull name.

Leo

--- End quote ---
As others have said, not every executable is a binary, and not every binary is an executable. Your confusion/anger is coming from a place where you’re assuming they’re equivalents, but they’re not!

I mean, I get what your thought process is, but it’s just not a sensible approach in practice.

Yes, all text on a computer is ultimately encoded as binary. So think of it like this: if all files are binaries, then we can still give more specific names to particular subtypes. In that case, “binary” becomes the catch-all for everything, especially for everything that doesn’t neatly fall into a named subtype. This approach can be nested.

For example, an HTML file is just a text file. And a text file is just a bunch of binary. But awareness of the  content gives us a special name for it, because by knowing this, we can interpret it in a certain way. It’s not just binary, it’s not just text, it’s HTML.

Computing is all about abstraction: wrapping one thing in another layer that shields you from the nitty-gritty details of the layers within. Without this onion of layer after layer after layer, modern computing plain and simply would not be distantly possible. As such, a lot of the terminology deals with naming the layer that’s most useful for a particular context.

We call binary files “binaries” because there’s no human-readable form. With a text file, there’s an abstraction layer that is human-readable, so we refer to that when we can.

Or like Masa said in the excellent example of digital actually being a subset of analog (ALL signals are analog at some level), yet nonetheless the analog/digital terms make a beautiful contrasting pair for almost all situations.

I completely agree with everyone telling you to lose the arrogance and simply learn and accept the terminology as it exists. You will NOT gain anything from your approach.

ogden:

--- Quote from: tooki on April 27, 2020, 04:00:31 pm ---We call binary files “binaries” because there’s no human-readable form.

--- End quote ---
Why do you add to confusion by introducing "human readability"? HEX files are not that much "human readable", many word processor files that are binary, can contain human-readable information.

Wikipedia says "A binary file is a computer file that is not a text file.". That's it. All you want to know. Well, besides knowing what text file is :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_file
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_file

Alex Eisenhut:

--- Quote from: tooki on April 27, 2020, 04:00:31 pm --- all text on a computer is ultimately encoded as binary.

--- End quote ---

Even if stored on a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-level_cell ?? ;D

tooki:

--- Quote from: ogden on April 27, 2020, 05:51:10 pm ---
--- Quote from: tooki on April 27, 2020, 04:00:31 pm ---We call binary files “binaries” because there’s no human-readable form.

--- End quote ---
Why do you add to confusion by introducing "human readability"? HEX files are not that much "human readable", many word processor files that are binary, can contain human-readable information.

--- End quote ---
Actually, that phrasing had already been introduced by others in this thread.

But your point is well taken. We meant “human readable” in that you can read the characters, even if they aren’t immediately understandable.

Hex, FWIW, is simply a convenient way to display binary data, instead of displaying long strings of 1s and 0s. They’re definitely not text files.



--- Quote from: ogden on April 27, 2020, 05:51:10 pm ---Wikipedia says "A binary file is a computer file that is not a text file.". That's it. All you want to know. Well, besides knowing what text file is :)

--- End quote ---
Well, it’s all you need to know unless you’re a cocky teenager who thinks he’s outsmarted the entirety of the computer industry!  ;D

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page

There was an error while thanking
Thanking...
Go to full version
Powered by SMFPacks Advanced Attachments Uploader Mod