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255 is a special number in some tasks having to do with computing. This is the maximum value representable by an eight-digit binary number, and therefore the maximum representable by an unsigned 8-bit byte (the most common size of byte, also called an octet), the smallest common variable size used in high level programming languages (bit being smaller, but rarely used for value storage).
Given a decimal number, it can be split into two pieces of about the same size, each of which is converted to binary, whereupon the first converted piece is multiplied by 10 k and added to the second converted piece, where k is the number of decimal digits in the second, least-significant piece before conversion.
In computer science, the double dabble algorithm is used to convert binary numbers into binary-coded decimal (BCD) notation. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] It is also known as the shift-and-add -3 algorithm , and can be implemented using a small number of gates in computer hardware, but at the expense of high latency .
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 ...
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]
A binary encoding is inherently less efficient for conversions to or from decimal-encoded data, such as strings (ASCII, Unicode, etc.) and BCD. A binary encoding is therefore best chosen only when the data are binary rather than decimal. IBM has published some unverified performance data. [2]
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 ...
This table illustrates an example of an 8 bit signed decimal value using the two's complement method. The MSb most significant bit has a negative weight in signed integers, in this case -2 7 = -128. The other bits have positive weights. The lsb (least significant bit) has weight 2 0 =1. The signed value is in this case -128+2 = -126.