No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
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Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
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Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
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That's it.
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Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
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Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
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Let everyone have their own content.
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Your computer's CPU doesn't understand human language or code, so programs are compiled from human-readable programming languages (like C++, Rust, etc.) into binary machine code. Machine code is basically just a bunch of CPU instructions and data that are formatted specifically for your CPU's architecture (depending on if it's x86, ARM, etc.).
Most of the time, when you install a program/app/game, you're only getting the compiled binary in your CPU's machine code, so you couldn't view the original "source code" without going through a complex process called "decompilation". And even then, you wouldn't have the legal rights to share or modify that code for others to use.
For something to be considered truly "open source", it not only makes the original source code available to the user, it also publishes that code under a license like the GPL which gives the user certain rights to use, copy, and/or modify the code.
You said "most of the time" - when is that not the case?
Some programs are distributed as "scripts" (in a scripting language like BASIC, BASH, Python, JavaScript, Lua, etc) which are stored on your computer in human-readable form and only converted into CPU machine code when you run the program, through an "interpreter" program.
Of course, everything boils down to binary machine code in the end, because those CPU instructions are the only language that your CPU actually works with.