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A binary number may also refer to a rational number that has a finite representation in the binary numeral system, that is, the quotient of an integer by a power of two. The base-2 numeral system is a positional notation with a radix of 2. Each digit is referred to as a bit, or binary digit.
Computer engineers often need to write out binary quantities, but in practice writing out a binary number such as 1001001101010001 is tedious and prone to errors. Therefore, binary quantities are written in a base-8, or "octal", or, much more commonly, a base-16, "hexadecimal" (hex), number format. In the decimal system, there are 10 digits, 0 ...
When the number becomes large, conversion to decimal is very tedious. However, when mapping to hexadecimal, it is trivial to regard the binary string as 4-digit groups and map each to a single hexadecimal digit. [30] This example shows the conversion of a binary number to decimal, mapping each digit to the decimal value, and adding the results.
This scheme can also be referred to as Simple Binary-Coded Decimal (SBCD) or BCD 8421, and is the most common encoding. [12] Others include the so-called "4221" and "7421" encoding – named after the weighting used for the bits – and "Excess-3". [13]
This bit numbering method has the advantage that for any unsigned number the value of the number can be calculated by using exponentiation with the bit number and a base of 2. [2] The value of an unsigned binary integer is therefore. where bi denotes the value of the bit with number i, and N denotes the number of bits in total.
Two's complement is the most common method of representing signed (positive, negative, and zero) integers on computers, [1] and more generally, fixed point binary values. Two's complement uses the binary digit with the greatest value as the sign to indicate whether the binary number is positive or negative; when the most significant bit is 1 the number is signed as negative and when the most ...
Sign extension (sometimes abbreviated as sext, particularly in mnemonics) is the operation, in computer arithmetic, of increasing the number of bits of a binary number while preserving the number's sign (positive/negative) and value. This is done by appending digits to the most significant side of the number, following a procedure dependent on ...
Binary-coded decimal (BCD) is a binary encoded representation of integer values that uses a 4-bit nibble to encode decimal digits. Four binary bits can encode up to 16 distinct values; but, in BCD-encoded numbers, only ten values in each nibble are legal, and encode the decimal digits zero, through nine. The remaining six values are illegal and ...