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Sign and Magnitude
Integers can be stored in a fixed-length store in two ways :
  • sign and magnitude
  • two's complement
 
Sign and Magnitude

The first bit is a sign bit and the remaining bits show the size (magnitude) of the number.

The sign bit is usually

  • 0 for positive integer
  • 1 for negative integer

Examples

Using an 8-bit store -

+24 would be represented by  0 0011000

-24 would be represented by  1 0011000