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 …
Tag: signed
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 …
Feb 01 2016
Binary Signed Integers – Signed Magnitude Shortcomings
I previously discussed the signed magnitude solution to representing signed integers as binary strings and pointed out that while it had the advantage of being simple, it also has some disadvantages. For starters, N-bit signed magnitude integers have two representations for zero: positive zero (a bitstring with N zeros) and negative zero (a bitstring with …
Nov 18 2015
Binary Signed Integers – Signed Magnitude
We humans and our meat computers don’t have any trouble recognizing the sign of a number. If there is a minus sign, “-,” in front of a number, that number is negative. If a number is prefixed by a plus sign, “+,” or, the more likely case, has no prefix at all, then the number …