Binary Overview

If you remember anything about binary, you’ll be familiar with a table like this one for binary numbers. Every position has a value increasing by a power of two.

If you use more bits, the pattern continues so you can represent even bigger numbers. Well, the computer doesn’t actually care what we assign to these bit positions. The binary value 0010 is generally accepted to mean the denary value 2, but it doesn’t have to, provided we tell people what it should be equivalent to and the usual rules of bit operations still make sense.

All the CPU will do is basic Boolean algebra and bit shifting. This is an important point – it is up to us to remember when the value is fixed point or not. The computer doesn’t know and doesn’t care.