I know that after compiling a software or application, its code is converted into the machine language.
Does a compiled software contain a binary 0 and 1?
What happens after compiling a software? Is the code converted into binary 0 and 1? What actually happens to its source code? How is such a huge amount of 0 and 1 stored in the computer?
Yes. Every piece of information on your computer is a comprised of bits (on PCs it's normally 8 bits per byte, and some systems define bytes as having a different number of bits). Although, source code, technically, is stored in binary form, a variety of approaches and methods can be used to identify it as "text."
Binary is the notation used to describe the base-2 representation of the data (1s and 0s). This document explains this notation in great detail, and will probably be of interest to you:
Binary code
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_code
After compilation, the resulting binary data usually represents a sequence of instructions (a.k.a., sequences of byte codes) that the processor understands and acts on accordingly. There are a large number of instructions that perform mathematical operations, modify memory contents, communicate with peripherals, and deal with a number of other things.
A high-level language like C, Pascal, Perl, etc., can be compiled into binary code which is then run directly by the CPU, and this binary code is most commonly referred to "machine language."
Assembler source code (which is not considered a "high-level language") is the form of source code that is closest to machine language, but also needs to be compiled to binary code for the CPU to process it correctly.
When interpreted code is run (such as with a script), it is being compiled on-the-fly by an interpreter as each line or section is encountered, and tends to run much slower than binary code as a result. BASIC (such as GW-BASIC from the DOS days in the 1980s and early 1990s), although not known as a scripting language, was also interpreted (including the loops -- there was no caching, every line was continually re-interpreted).
Everything on a computer is a collection of bytes. Since bytes are a set number (usually 8) of ones and zeros, indeed everything in a computer is ones and zeroes.
A program is a stream of instructions.
CPU's work by fetching bytes from RAM and performing an action based on the value of that byte. A stream of such bytes forms a program. Bytes in this context are called opcodes and represent elementary operations.
Compiling is a multi-stage process that essentially "converts" or "translates" source code text into a stream of opcodes. Nothing happens to the original source code.
Compilers are themselves programs whose job is to read through source code text and make the conversion to machine language. Central to the operation of any compiler is a concept called a parser that scans each character (byte) of each line of text, separates it into words and operators (i.e., tokens), and figures out based on the the presence and order of specific words what machine language opcodes to generate.
Programs rarely execute from start to finish. Usually decisions (i.e. conditional statements) are made based on data gathered by the program and the program might skip (a.k.a. jump or branch) to different sections of itself. Alternatively sections of the programs might be written as subroutines or functions and might be reused or called throughout the program. Because of this most compilers have to make two passes or more through the source code to figure out where all the "jumps" end up to. This is called linking.
Huge numbers of zeroes and ones are able to be stored mainly because of advances in chip manufacturing technology, and the fact that a CPU can access an amount of RAM that is 2 to the power of the number of address lines it has. A 32-bit CPU usually has at least 32 address lines, so thats 2^32 or 4Gbytes of RAM. Memory wasn't always this cheap or plentiful. Ads for computers in the late 70's/early 80's show that RAM was $500 or more for 4Kbytes, and even more expensive the earlier you go.
As other answers said, yes, computers store and handle data and instructions BINARY, so they, or better, their most basic elements (transistors etc.) compute with two states, On/Off, Low/High, or 0 and 1.
But there are (or were) other methods! There are analog computers, the opposite of DIGITAL computers, where digital means that you can point out DISCREET and specific values (digit <-> finger). In analog computers, you can not, there are no values of a distinct nature, everything is something in between (as in whole numbers and real numbers). But there's no "program" which gets compiled to machine code. There are mechanical/electronic elements which determine the "program"
More interesting: There are DIGITAL computers that are not operating binary but TERNARY:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_computer
In these computers there are THREE states, -1/0/1. And there're even programs which get compiled to a machine code. So, concluding: Maybe. Compiled software may also contain three digital identifiers, -1, 0 and 1 ;)
While the answer yes is correct, the answer no is more correct.
The information is stored (as has already been said) in electrical charges: on and off or maybe positive and negative or high and low or low and high, and some systems used current instead of charge. But in summary there are two electrical states.
To make things easier people abstracted this to 0 and 1, that way they did not need to know how the hardware did it and the code was more portable.
Later more layers of abstraction where added: assembler, character codes (ASCII etc), then …
so
if (a==b)
{
…
}
may becomes
ld r1 a
ld r0 b
cmp r1,r0
br.z %endif1
…
%endif1
Now you may hear that cmp r1,r2 is converted to 0110110111001010, but this is not exactly correct. Because 0110110111001010 is a sequence of 16 characters (at least 16 bytes uncompressed) that represents 2 bytes of data. But is it wrong to say this? Well only in the same way that me saying that I had spaghetti for dinner is wrong. I did not have a sequence of characters s p a g h e t t i for dinner. I can not show you what I had. I can show a picture, but I did not eat a picture. So remember the 0s and 1s are just a representation of what is really happening. And when I say I see 1 moon in the sky, this 1 represents something completely different. And when I say beware that the characters 1 and l and the characters 0 and O, can be confused these 1s and 0s are again a different thing.
