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Signed integers (cont)

Signed magnitude: Easy to form -X from X ... XOR in high-order bit

A problem (using 8-bit ints) ...

  • what do these numbers represent?  00000000,  10000000
Two zeroes ... one positive, one negative

Another problem:  x + -x ≠ 0 (mostly) with simple addition

  00000011  3     00101010  42      01111111  127
+ 10000011 -3   + 10101010 -42    + 11111111 -127
  --------        --------          --------
  10000110 !0     11010100  !0      01111110   !0

To fix requires extra hardware in ALU (Arithmetic Logic Unit) in the CPU