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sign-magnitude

An abandoned way to store negative numbers - a sign bit in front of the size - which has two zeros and needs special adding hardware.

Sign-magnitude representation stores a sign bit and the absolute value in the remaining n-1 bits; it has +0 and -0 and requires sign-dependent addition logic.

Examples

  • In 8-bit sign-magnitude, −5 is 10000101, and zero has two patterns, 00000000 and 10000000.

See also

sign bit signed integer
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