Does machine care? Do transistors or NAND gates care?
Literally true of anything, though. The computer doesn't care about any of this, because it's a non-being. It's just as "happy" being unpowered altogether. Literally anything a computer does only ultimately matters to the human who gives interpretations to the things.
And, like I said, as far as memory is concerned, type isn't a thing.
It is a tricky philosophical question, I agree. Again, my point is, the concept of "type" does exist at machine code level, just in a painfully non-abstracted fashion.
My opinion: it exists in the same way as glider exists in the game of life. The structure itself exists on the board, but the meaning exists in the head of observer. From board (game of life) pov: yet another configuration. From human pov: oh look it has interesting properties.
Yeah, I think that's fair. I just don't want anyone to get the idea that "type" (conceptually) isn't an important concept in machine code, which would be fundamentally misleading.
BTW, although I have limited experience writing assembly, I checked all of this with one of my co-workers, who programmed in binary and machine code (with punchcards) as his full time job for many years.
Literally true of anything, though. The computer doesn't care about any of this, because it's a non-being. It's just as "happy" being unpowered altogether. Literally anything a computer does only ultimately matters to the human who gives interpretations to the things.
And, like I said, as far as memory is concerned, type isn't a thing.
It is a tricky philosophical question, I agree. Again, my point is, the concept of "type" does exist at machine code level, just in a painfully non-abstracted fashion.
Although, I think we actually agree on that.
My opinion: it exists in the same way as glider exists in the game of life. The structure itself exists on the board, but the meaning exists in the head of observer. From board (game of life) pov: yet another configuration. From human pov: oh look it has interesting properties.
Yeah, I think that's fair. I just don't want anyone to get the idea that "type" (conceptually) isn't an important concept in machine code, which would be fundamentally misleading.
BTW, although I have limited experience writing assembly, I checked all of this with one of my co-workers, who programmed in binary and machine code (with punchcards) as his full time job for many years.
Fair point. I'm not sure shall we call it Types or Encoding 🤔.
Non scientific chart:
Heh, excellent chart. "Machine types" is a bit closer to what I'm talking about, I think, although encoding certainly enters into it some.