Sorry, I'm afraid I don't follow... but since you mention the high bit, note how in two's complement, the high bit is basically the sign bit. And the other nice thing is that the binary math still works well:
- -8+1 is 1000+0001, which =1001, which is -7
- -2-2 is 1110+1110, which =11100, drop the overflow and 1100 is -4
- -2+5 is 1110+0101, which =10011, drop the overflow and 0011 is 3
Of course, there are still overflow issues, e.g. 7+1 turns out as -8, but those will always happen with any fixed number of bits. Of course, the advantage of Perl's scalars here is that they will upgrade themselves automatically! (At the risk of losing some precision)
Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
Please read these before you post! —
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
- a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
| |
For: |
|
Use: |
| & | | & |
| < | | < |
| > | | > |
| [ | | [ |
| ] | | ] |
Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.