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

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LeoTech:
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

greenpossum:

--- Quote from: LeoTech on April 25, 2020, 10:47:11 am ---Because if not, let's try to stop that misconception.

--- End quote ---

 :-DD Good luck with that. There are lots of terms which are slightly wrong now but you'll never correct the usage.

Besides calling them executable is also slightly wrong because they are only executable wrt a particular processor. An executable for an Intel processor would just be binary to an ARM processor. Even within families a Pentium executable would be meaningless on a 8086.

So as long as it's not text, it's not wrong to call them binary. But feel free to call them executables, nobody will correct you.

Edit: The thing with categories is there will always be exceptions to them, such is human creativity. Here's something to think about: a BASIC program file, that's readable text right? So not binary, right? But what if I told you that the BASIC file is stored tokenised as Microsoft Basic for CP/M used to do. If you look at it in a hex display program it's binary. But if you list it inside the BASIC interpreter it's text. Categories are slippery. By all means be as precise as you can but accept that human communication will always be less than 100% precise.

cgroen:

--- Quote from: LeoTech on April 25, 2020, 10:47:11 am ---As great as the internet is, this is just a stupid mistake that somebody once made and now everybody keeps repeating that.

Leo

--- End quote ---

 :-DD Not sure how old you are, but we called files binary and non-binary long before the internet (as we know it today) conquered  the world  ^-^
Calling a file "binary" is as common now as it were 40 years ago from where I'm from.

Bicurico:
A binary file is a file where the meaning of each byte is not human readable.
A text or ASCII file is a file which is human readable in a text editor, because each byte is meant to be interpreted as an ASCII code.

A binary file can contain executable code or data - the data is just not readable in an text editor, in other words it does not represent ASCII data.

Regards,
Vitor

jpanhalt:
Here's something to ponder...

Here are a few lines from a .hex file:
[plain]
:100000002F0000EA24F0A0E340F0A0E32CF0A0E3EE
:1000100034F0A0E30000A0E1F0FF1FE5BA00A0E388
:10002000070000EAA800A0E3050000EAAE00A0E394
:10003000030000EAB400A0E304E04EE2000000EA9E
:10004000BF00A0E304E04EE280119FE50120D0E470
:10005000143091E5200013E3FCFFFF0A000052E397
:1000600000208115F8FFFF1A0850A0E39840A0E394
:100070002E0EA0E1002094E7143091E5200013E358
[/plain]

But what you are actually seeing on your monitor is ascii.  Does that make it "stupid" to call it a "hex" file?

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