Signed, and Other, Representations

Although the "natural" integers 1,2,3,. . .) are adequate for many, everyday, purposes they do not handle concepts such as debts; the representation must extended to handle negative values. This chapter therefore introduces the three conventional forms of signed binary representation (sign and magnitude, ones complement and two complement). Finally, it describes some other important number representations, especially mixed base (for non-metric measures), but also the more-specialised redundant codings, Gray codes and Zeckendorf representations.

Keywords: Signed Binary, Ones Complement, Twos Complement, Sign and Magnitude, Biased, Sign extension, Fibonacci Numbers, Zeckendorf representation, Gray codes, redundant codes.