It amazes me that during all my years of studies and career as a computer scientist, I just came across the term nibble or nybble, meaning half a byte, or 4 bits.
Hi Nargess, interestingly, I also never heared about Nibbles before. When I studied in the 80s physics, we were introduced to "half-bytes", i.e. a group of 4 bites representing the first or the last half of an entire byte. Since each of them can code 16 different values (the hexadecimals 0-9 A-F), I think they are mainly used to write down digital code in a more human appealing manner (for instance 6B instead of 0110 1010). Therefore this notation is widely used in machine language programming. But for the processing of information on the microprocessor level, they are probably not really meaningful. I mean there is no possibility that a processor can directly calculate something like 3+A=D.
By the way, the rarity of your posts would make it appropriate to rename your blog to "one lesson a year".
Hi Nargess, interestingly, I also never heared about Nibbles before. When I studied in the 80s physics, we were introduced to "half-bytes", i.e. a group of 4 bites representing the first or the last half of an entire byte. Since each of them can code 16 different values (the hexadecimals 0-9 A-F), I think they are mainly used to write down digital code in a more human appealing manner (for instance 6B instead of 0110 1010). Therefore this notation is widely used in machine language programming. But for the processing of information on the microprocessor level, they are probably not really meaningful. I mean there is no possibility that a processor can directly calculate something like 3+A=D.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, the rarity of your posts would make it appropriate to rename your blog to "one lesson a year".
Best regards and wishes, Michael