9 Addresses and Pointers
Your computer is, at its core, a processor (the Central Processing Unit or CPU) and a vast meadow of switches (the Random-Access Memory or RAM) that can be turned on or off by the processor. We say that a switch holds one bit of information. You will often see 1 used to represent “on” and 0 used to represent “off.”
Eight of these switches make a byte of information. The processor can fetch the state of these switches, do operations on the bits, and store the result in another set of switches. For example, the processor might fetch a byte from here and another byte from there, add them together, and store the result in a byte someplace else.
Figure 9.1 Memory and the CPU
The memory is numbered, ...
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