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From: jeff@rtech.UUCP (Jeff Lichtman)
Newsgroups: net.nlang,net.dcom
Subject: Re: Squeezing files.
Message-ID: <518@rtech.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 28-Jun-85 03:52:31 EDT
Article-I.D.: rtech.518
Posted: Fri Jun 28 03:52:31 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 30-Jun-85 00:49:06 EDT
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Organization: Relational Technology, Alameda CA
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> >
> >I'm curious; what is the etymology of the word "binary" as it is
> >sometimes used to refer to executable machine code?  And why does it
> >imply program rather than data?
> 

Here's my guess.  There are many ways to represent numbers (as we all should
know).  Binary is a format that people have trouble reading, and strings of
the characters 0-9 are easy to read.  I believe that, by extension, the word
"binary" is applied to any non-human-readable data, especially when it is
stored in files.  The human-readable and non-human-readable forms of programs
(source and object or executable code) parallel the human-readable and
non-human-readable forms of numbers, so its easy to draw an analogy.
-- 
Jeff Lichtman at rtech (Relational Technology, Inc.)
aka Swazoo Koolak

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