The trouble is, the data will be effectively "garbage" for one of those interpretations.
But who will understand that this is a garbage? Does machine care? Do transistors or NAND gates care? This is the human who gives interpretation to the things.
It's possible to interpret the same 32-bit chunk of memory as a single-precision floating point number, or as a 32-bit integer, or as a Unicode character.
Who decides which interpretation to give it? Programmer who wrote the program, in which they put instruction: "go to memory X, take N digits and treat them as number..."
This is tricky philosophical question, if you like this kind of things I recommend to read Real Patterns essay.
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.
But who will understand that this is a garbage? Does machine care? Do transistors or NAND gates care? This is the human who gives interpretation to the things.
Who decides which interpretation to give it? Programmer who wrote the program, in which they put instruction: "go to memory X, take N digits and treat them as number..."
This is tricky philosophical question, if you like this kind of things I recommend to read Real Patterns essay.
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.