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Make a note about "gigabyte"
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steveklabnik committed Nov 6, 2015
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Expand Up @@ -74,7 +74,9 @@ visualize what’s going on with memory. Your operating system presents a view o
memory to your program that’s pretty simple: a huge list of addresses, from 0
to a large number, representing how much RAM your computer has. For example, if
you have a gigabyte of RAM, your addresses go from `0` to `1,073,741,823`. That
number comes from 2<sup>30</sup>, the number of bytes in a gigabyte.
number comes from 2<sup>30</sup>, the number of bytes in a gigabyte. [^gigabyte]

[^gigabyte]: ‘Gigabyte’ can mean two things: 10^9, or 2^30. The SI standard resolved this by stating that ‘gigabyte’ is 10^9, and ‘gibibyte’ is 2^30. However, very few people use this terminology, and rely on context to differentiate. We follow in that tradition here.

This memory is kind of like a giant array: addresses start at zero and go
up to the final number. So here’s a diagram of our first stack frame:
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