#internal-representation

Why prefer two’s complement over sign-and-magnitude for signed numbers?

It’s done so that addition doesn’t need to have any special logic for dealing with negative numbers. Check out the article on Wikipedia. Say you have two numbers, 2 and -1. In your “intuitive” way of representing numbers, they would be 0010 and 1001, respectively (I’m sticking to 4 bits for size). In the two’s complement way, they are 0010 and 1111. Now, let’s say I want to add them. Two’s…