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Answer:

No. ASCII characters are wasteful of bits, since only seven of the eight bits are used. A compressed file makes better use of bit patterns. The bytes in the compressed file do not correspond directly to ASCII.


Executable Files

When one says "executable file" one really means:

Executable File: A file containing a sequence of bytes. Each byte holds a bit pattern that represents part of a machine instruction for a particular processor. The operating system can load (copy) an executable file into main storage and can then execute the program.

A byte in an executable file can contain any possible 8-bit pattern. A file like this often is called a Binary File. This is misleading vocabulary. All files represent their information as binary patterns.

When one says "MS Word file" one really means:

Word File: A file containing a sequence of bytes. Each byte holds a bit pattern created by the MS Word program, which encodes data only that program (and a few others) can process.

There is nothing special about the various "types" of files. Each is a sequence of bytes. Each byte holds a bit pattern. A byte can hold one of 256 possible patterns (although some file types allow only 128 or fewer of these patterns). When longer bit patterns are needed they are held in several contiguous bytes.


QUESTION 11:

Say that you compress a text file with a file compression utility. What is the minimum compression can you expect?


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