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The register width of a processor determines the range of values that can be represented in its registers. Though the vast majority of computers can perform multiple-precision arithmetic on operands in memory, allowing numbers to be arbitrarily long and overflow to be avoided, the register width limits the sizes of numbers that can be operated on (e.g., added or subtracted) using a single ...
Saturation arithmetic also enables overflow of additions and multiplications to be detected consistently without an overflow bit or excessive computation, by simple comparison with the maximum or minimum value (provided the datum is not permitted to take on these values).
The overflow flag is thus set when the most significant bit (here considered the sign bit) is changed by adding two numbers with the same sign (or subtracting two numbers with opposite signs). Overflow cannot occur when the sign of two addition operands are different (or the sign of two subtraction operands are the same). [1]
Arbitrary-precision arithmetic can also be used to avoid overflow, which is an inherent limitation of fixed-precision arithmetic. Similar to an automobile's odometer display which may change from 99999 to 00000, a fixed-precision integer may exhibit wraparound if numbers grow too large to represent at the fixed level of precision.
In addition and subtraction, the result may require one bit more than the operands. In multiplication of two unsigned integers with m and n bits, the result may have m+n bits. In case of overflow, the high-order bits are usually lost, as the un-scaled integer gets reduced modulo 2 n where n is the size of the storage area. The sign bit, in ...
The same carry bit is also generally used to indicate borrows in subtraction, though the bit's meaning is inverted due to the effects of two's complement arithmetic. Normally, a carry bit value of "1" signifies that an addition overflowed the ALU, and must be accounted for when adding data words of lengths greater than that of the CPU. For ...
In computer programming, a bitwise operation operates on a bit string, a bit array or a binary numeral (considered as a bit string) at the level of its individual bits.It is a fast and simple action, basic to the higher-level arithmetic operations and directly supported by the processor.
The ones' complement of a binary number is the value obtained by inverting (flipping) all the bits in the binary representation of the number. The name "ones' complement" [1] refers to the fact that such an inverted value, if added to the original, would always produce an "all ones" number (the term "complement" refers to such pairs of mutually additive inverse numbers, here in respect to a ...