Is "binary" a language?

Lost User

That's like saying the alphabet is a language. Binary can provide the building blocks of a language, but I do not see how it can be a language itself.

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NormDroid

Binary is a base 2 number system. It is not a language and does not exhibit language charactistics, such as grammar, constructs, declarations, logic etc.

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Emrak123

010000100110010100100000011100110111010101110010011001 010010000001110100011011110010000001100100011100100110 100101101110011010110010000001111001011011110111010101 110010001000000100111101110110011000010110110001110100 01101001011011100110010100101110

OriginalGriff

No. Language is defined as: "Communication of thoughts and feelings through a system of arbitrary signals, such as voice sounds, gestures, or written symbols" http://www.thefreedictionary.com/language[^] Binary is the system of arbitrary symbols which carry language, in the same way as the Alphabet does for Written English, and Phonemes do for spoken English.

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Wayne Gaylard

A language is a system of symbols and rules used for communicating. Therefore you could imply that binary is a language, in that it has symbols (albeit only 2), and it has rules for combining these symbols into a structure that can be interpreted by another person without the originator being present.

Mladen Jankovic

0101 :thumbsup:

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peterchen

Exactly, it's an alphabet.

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David1987

Well yes I'd say it is[^], so there actually are teams of binary programmers out there :) Ok not many and it's a theoretical busyness.. And incidentally, it does have a grammar: any non-empty string containing only the characters 0 or 1.

Michael Schubert

Tell your boss to fire the second camp.

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R Giskard Reventlov

No, at least not in the commonly held notion of what a language is. It could be construed to be an alphabet, of sorts, by which you can build meaning by combining the characters to produce 'words' that convey a meaning that is more than the sum of the parts. Another test might be that language is a spoken medium and it would be pretty difficult to speak binary in that you could voice a string of zeroes and ones with appropriate breaks or stresses whereas with a 'normal' language the characters combine to create meaning that can be articulated vocally in a meaningful way with more natural or learnt breaks and stresses. I suppose if you could find someone else that spoke binary you would have a language but it would, to our ears, sound very odd and take a long time to say almost nothing. :-)

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jeron1

101010

TheGreatAndPowerfulOz

No, binary is no more a language than decimal.

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Mike Hankey

0100 0010

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Dan Neely

The second camp needs worked over with a cluebat and explained the difference between 'binary' and 'machine language'. If they're clear on that but still think it's a language they probably need pink slips. :doh:

3x12=36 2x12=24 1x12=12 0x12=18

Luc Pattyn

you are right, and so are they. try and define language. 1. everything is a language, as it has vocabulary, has or could have syntax (rules about what is allowed and isn't allowed), has or could have semantics (giving meaning to the linguistic building blocks). 2. there are no languages, it is impossible to strictly define a language; all practical languages are ambiguous to some degree; a lot of languages can not even be parsed correctly all the time. if you find time to discuss such things at work, it tells me there are too many of you at your job... now go back to work and write some more assembly instructions. :) PS: is DNA a language?

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MecAlex

Definitely not a language. It is a type of data. Type of encoding data with electrical impulse

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realJSOP

Luc Pattyn wrote:

everything is a language

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Rob Philpott

Not sure who's the biggest nerd - you for writing that or me for working it out.

Regards, Rob Philpott.

Luc Pattyn

there probably are too many dialects for your language to be really useful. :)

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Please use <PRE> tags for code snippets, they preserve indentation, improve readability, and make me actually look at the code.