Practice question · True or false
The byte 01000001 is the number 65 or the letter A depending on how the program interprets it, not on anything stored with the byte.
Hints
- Is a type stored alongside the bits in memory?
- The interpretation lives in the code, not the byte.
Show the answer
True
Why
True. The byte carries no tag; the meaning comes from the instruction that reads it. That is why a type error can reinterpret text as an integer without any hardware objection, why char and int8 differ only in the compiler's bookkeeping, and why file formats need magic numbers to announce what they are.
Practise Information Encoding and Binary Representation
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