Meaning of 1000000000000 is a number and storing that number is a different story (we'll get back to it in a moment). It has even more meanings in different systems.

Typewriters had no CPU or memory at all and they were handling such 'numbers' pretty well, because it's just text. 1 trillion is an abstract concept of a numberīy pressing 1 once and then 0 12 times you're typing text.Second, 1 trillion and 1000000000000 are two different things. 32-bit CPUs use words consisting of 32 bits, thus they can store numbers from 0 to 2 32-1 in one word. operations on data of that size are implemented in hardware and are generally fastest to perform). Machine word is the amount of data the CPU can process in a natural way (ie.

While a 32-bit integer may not be able to hold a value of 1000000000000, a 32-bit floating-point number will be able to, using an entirely different interpretation.Īs for how computers can work with and process large numbers internally, there exist 64-bit integers (which can accommodate values of up to 16-billion-billion), floating-point values, as well as specialized libraries that can work with arbitrarily large numbers.įirst and foremost, 32-bit computers can store numbers up to 2 32-1 in a single machine word. As in the above example, it can be interpreted as a numerical value, a character, or even something else entirely. None of them can hold the entire, numerical value, but interpreted individually as ASCII characters (for example, the character ' 0' is represented by decimal value 48, binary value 00110000), they can be strung together into a format that makes sense for you, a human.Ī related concept in programming is typecasting, which is how a computer will interpret a particular stream of 0s and 1s. Each individual byte can hold a value of up to 255. To literally display the number '1000000000000' requires 13 bytes of memory. The printed string '1000000000000' is not represented by a 32-bit integer in memory. However, the value of this 32-bit integer and how it appears on your screen are two completely different things. You are correct that a 32-bit integer cannot hold a value greater than 2^32-1.

Wolfram mathematica limit memory