OpenEuphoria

Re: binary files ,kudos,RE:new to this

• Posted by Derek Parnell <ddparnell at bigpond.com> Jan 28, 2003
• 381 views

On Mon, 27 Jan 2003 20:10:26 -0500, <dubetyrant at hotmail.com> wrote:

>
> Hey all,
>
> Could anyone tell me what "binary files" are? I know we can read and 
> write from them but I am not
> sure what they are. Are they for machine code programming? What are their 
> .ext? What do they
> contain?
> Also kudos to the archives these days! Especially "Mic", I don't really 
> understand the stuff
> but I think either him or Matt Lewis (through the COM library) are going 
> to push EUPHORIA
> past the "3d barrier". And to "new to this", Euphoria is easy to learn, 
> probably the best language to learn if you
> know absolutely nothing about programming computers. I'm learning C++ in 
> college now
> and its a pain, there are dozens of data types that you have to know, and 
> you have to make
> sure you use the right type in the right place, and all kinds of other 
> things that make it
> complicated(and needlessly so).But I'm way ahead of everyone else in my 
> class because I
> learned how to program with EUPHORIA. But keep plugging away with it, I 
> first started learning
> through a program called "Beginners guide to euphoria", just type the 
> name in the archives
> search box and you should find it, its less than 1 megabyte it should 
> take about 3-5 minutes
> with 56k modem.
> JDUBE

Strictly speaking a 'binary' file is one that contains non-text characters. 
Generally, files can be classified as either text or binary. Text files 
contain only text characters (alphabetic, digits, punctuation, and some 
special text chars such as TAB, NEWLINE and CARRIGE-RETURN (about 100 or so 
of the possible 256 different bytes values). Text files are internally 
organized into lines of text. A line is defined as all the characters up to 
and including the end-of-line marker. In Microsoft world the end-of-line is 
a two-byte sequence of CARRIAGE-RETURN and NEWLINE (#0D0A) but in the unix 
world the EOL is just a single NEWLINE (#0A) byte. Binary files can contain 
all 256 byte values and their internal structure can be anything at all. In 
order to understand the contents of a binary file, you need to know its 
structure first. Examples of binary files are bitmaps (.BMP), music (.MP3) 
and executable programs (.EXE). Each of these has a structure which is 
documented and you must use this to understand their contents. Have a look 
at http://www.wotsit.org for a list of standard binary file formats.

-- 

cheers,
Derek Parnell