You could view every register and memory address as already containing a collection of bits.

Binary and decimal are representations, a way of displaying something. The computer does not need to represent the bits in a human readable way (e.g. binary) to operate on them. No conversion occurs, because the binary representation of a scalar describes what's already in the scalar.

In reply to Re^3: Understanding Shift Operators by ikegami
in thread Understanding Shift Operators by spickles

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