How are keywords represented in binary form?

Question

How are keywords represented in binary form? For ex:: In java, how is the sin() represented in binary? How is sqrt() and other functions represented.

If not only in java, in any language how is it represented?? because ultimately everything is translated into binary and then into on and off signals.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Firstly, sin is not a keyword in Java. It is an identifier. Keywords are things like if, class, and so on.

It depends on when you are asking about.

• In the source code, the sin identifier is represented as characters, and those characters are represented as bits (i.e. binary) .... if you want to look at it that way.

• In the classfile that is output by the javac compiler, the word sin is represented as string in the Constant Pool. (The JVM spec specifies the format of classfiles in great detail.)

• When the classfile is first loaded by a JVM, the word sin becomes a Java String object.

• When the code is linked by the JVM, the reference to the String is resolved to some kind of reference to a method. (The details are implementation specific. You'd need to read the JVM source code to find out more.)

• When the code is JIT compiler, the reference to the method (typically) turns into the address in memory of the first native instruction of the JIT compiled method. (Strictly speaking, this is not "assembly language". But the native instructions could be represented as assembly language. Assembly language is really just a "human friendly" textual representation of the instructions.)

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so how does the computer know that when sin is written it has to do the sine of a number.

What happens is that the Java runtime loads that class containing the method. Then it looks for the sin(double) method in the class that it loaded. What typically happens is that the named method resolves to some bytecodes that are the instructions that tell the runtime what the method should do. But in the case of sin, the method is a native method, and the instructions are actually native instructions that are part of one of the JVM's native libraries.

If not of methods, Can we have binary representation of Keywords?? Like int, and float etc??

It depends on the actual keywords. But generally speaking, genuine Java keywords are transformed by the compiler into a form that doesn't have a distinct / discrete representation for the individual keywords.

Answer 2

sin() is a function so it's represented as a memory address where its code block is. Keywords (like for) aren't represented as binary, for for example is converted to a list of byte code jump instructions which are compiled into assembly instructions which are represented as binary.

My point is that you cannot convert most keywords directly into binary. You can unroll them into bytecode which you could then convert to native machine code and binary but not directly to binary.

Here, read this then after you understand it move onto how bytecode is converted to native code.

Keywords and Functions

That said, a keyword in Java (and most languages) is a reserved word like for, while or return but your examples are not keywords, they are function names like sin() and sqrt()

Answer 3

Not really sure what you want to know here; so let's go "bytecode"...

Both the .sin() and .sqrt() methods are static methods from the Math class; therefore, the compiler will generate a call site with both arguments, a reference to the method and then call invokestatic.

Other than invokestatic, you have invokevirtual, invokespecial, invokeinterface and (since Java 7) invokedynamic.

Now, at runtime, the JIT will kick in; and the JIT may end up producing pure native code, but this is not a guarantee. In any event, the code will be fast enough.

And the same goes for the JDK libraries themselves; the JIT will kick in and maybe turn the byte code into native code given a sufficient time to analyze it (escape analysis, inlining etc).

And since the JIT does "whatever it wants", you reliably cannot have a "binary" representation of any method from any class.

Answer 4

If not only in java, in any language how is it represented?? because ultimately everything is translated into binary and then into on and off signals.

This tells me that you probably have a fundamental misunderstanding of how programming languages are implemented. So instead of answering this question (it doesn't really have a proper answer other than "well they're not represented at all"), I will try to help you understand why this question is the wrong one to ask.

Your computer runs machine code, and only machine code. You can feed it any random sequence of bytes, it doesn't matter what they were intended to be, as soon as you point the program counter to it it will be interpreted as if it is machine code (of course giving it bytes that were not intended to be machine code is probably a bad idea). As a running example, I'll use this x64 code:

48 01 F7 48 89 F8 C3 

If you have no idea what's going on, that's normal at this level. Most people don't read machine code (but they could if they learned it, it's not magic). This is where the zeroes and ones are, to the processor it's not even in hexadecimal, that's just what humans like to read.

At a level above that there is assembly, which is in most cases really just a different way of looking at machine code, in such a way that humans find it easier to read. The example from earlier looks more sensible in assembly:

add rdi, rsi
mov rax, rdi
ret

Still not very clear what's going on to someone who doesn't know x64 assembly, but at least it gives some sort of clue: there's an add in it. It probably adds things.

At a yet higher level, you could have java bytecode or java, but I think the java aspect of this question misses the point, it's probably there because OP doesn't realize that java is different from "the classic picture". Java just complicates matters without explaining the big picture. Let's use C instead. The example in C could look like:

int64_t foo_or_whatever(int64_t x, int64_t y)
{
    return x + y;
}

If you don't know C but you do know Java, the only strange thing here is int64_t, which is roughly the equivalent of a long in Java.

So yes, things were added, as the assembly code suggested. Now where did the keywords go?

That question doesn't make as much sense as you thought it did. The compiler understands keywords, and uses them to create machine code that implements your program. After that point they stop being relevant. They only mean something in the context of the high level language that you wrote the code in, you could say that at that level, they are stored as ASCII or UTF8 string in a file. They have nothing to do with machine code, they do not appear in any form there, and you can write machine code without having translated it from a high level language that has keywords. That return and ret looks vaguely similar is a bit of a red herring, they have something to do with each other but the relation is far from simple (that it worked out simply in the example I'm using is of course no accident).

The int64_t has perhaps not entirely disappeared (mostly it has, though). The fact that the addition operates on 64bit integers is encoded in the instruction 48 01 F7. Not the keyword int64_t (which isn't even a keyword, but let's not get into that), "the fact that what you have there is an addition between 64bit integers", which is an conceptually different thing though caused here by the use of int64_t. To split that instruction out while skipping some of the detail (because this is a beginner question), there's

48 = 01001000 encoding REX.W, meaning this instruction is 64bit
01 = 00000001 encoding add rm64, r64 in this case
D1 = 11010001 encoding the operands rdi and rsi

To learn more about what the processor does with machine code (in case your follow-up question is "but how does it know what to do with something like 48 01 F7"), study computer architecture. If you want a book, I recommend Computer Architecture, Fifth Edition: A Quantitative Approach, which is quite accessible to beginners and commonly used in first-year courses about computer architectures.

To learn more about the journey from high level language to machine code, study compiler construction. If you want a book, I recommend Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools, but it may be hard to get through it as a beginner. If you want a free course, you could follow Compilers on Coursera (the first few lectures especially will give you an overview of what compilers do without getting too technical yet).

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Incidentally, if you give the example C code to GCC, it makes

lea rax, [rdi + rsi]
ret

It's still doing the same thing, but in a way that didn't fit my story, so I took the liberty of doing it in a slightly different way.