Abraham Lincoln once famously said, “Everybody loves a compliment.” I suspect that if he had been a mathematician he would have loved complements, too. We’ve already seen what complements are and talked about the two most prolific: the radix complement and the diminished radix complement. Now it’s time to explore how we can leverage complements …
Tag: ones complement
Jan 10 2017
Number System Complements
In my last post about binary signed integers, I introduced the ones complement representation. At the time, I said that the ones complement was found by taking the bitwise complement of the number. My explanation about how to do this was simple: invert each bit, flipping 1 to 0 and vice versa. While it’s true that …
Jul 26 2016
Binary Signed Integers – Ones Complement
In the last post, we saw that one of the major failings of the signed magnitude representation was that addition and subtraction could not be performed on the same hardware as for unsigned integers. As I pointed out, the reason for this is because negating a number in signed magnitude does not yield the additive …