CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bytebit
S M Mahmud Hasan
S M Mahmud Hasan

Reputation: 3

How many numbers can we store with 1 bit?

I want to know how many characters or numbers can I store in 1 bit only. It will be more helpful if you tell it in octal, hexadecimal.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 6660

Answers (2)

Tom Blodget
Tom Blodget

Reputation: 20802

A bit is a "binary digit", or a value from a set of size two. If you have one or more bits, you raise 2 to the power of the number of bits. So, 2¹ gives 2. The field in Mathematics is called combinatorics.

Upvotes: 0

Stephen C
Stephen C

Reputation: 718946

I want to know how many characters or numbers can I store in 1 bit only.

It is not practical to use a single bit to store numbers or characters. However, you could say:

  • One integer provided that the integer is in the range 0 to 1.

  • One ASCII character provided that the character is either NUL (0x00) or SOH (0x01).

The bottom line is that a single bit has two states: 0 and 1. Any value domain with more that two values in the domain cannot be represented using a single bit.

It will be more helpful if you tell it in octal, hexadecimal.

That is not relevant to the problem. Octal and hexadecimal are different textual representations for numeric data. They make no difference to the meaning of the numbers, or (in most cases1) the way that you represent the numbers in a computer.

1 - The exception is when you are representing numbers as text; e.g. when you represent the number 42 in a text document as the character '4' followed by the character '2'.

Upvotes: 2

Related Questions