CS241 Study Guide - Instruction Register, Arithmetic Logic Unit, Opcode
Document Summary
Sequential programs are procedurally driven programs which only use a single process at a time. They are single-threaded and do not run processes concurrently. For this course, we are not interested in what those programs do, but simply in how they do it. These programs can be written in machine language, assembly, higher-level languages whatever. Since each is an abstraction of a lower level to which we can build a compiler, all of them will give us the same nal result. A computer sees a string such as 10000011 as a sequence of bits, without regards to any sort of encoding. This could be binary, hexadecimal, decimal, ascii pretty much everything, but the computer can not know which. We tend to write them in the form 0x2a, which is equal to 42 in decimal. With n bits, we can represent 2n numbers in binary.