CIS3355: Business Data Structures
Fall, 2008
 

What are unsigned integers ??

As we have seen before, by default, all numeric values are stored with a sign-bit. However, there may be times when I want to store values which can not be negative. Some examples of integers which are always non-negative are:

If I specifically declare that I want to store a variable as unsigned then no sign-bit will be included; ALL of the bits will be used to store the value (meaning that we will be able to represent numbers twice as large as we could with the sign-bit). For example, suppose that I want to store values on 8-bits:

Wait!! You mean the bit sequence 10110100 can mean either the value 180 or -76 ??

Absolutely.

How do I know which value is stored?

You basically have to be told what type of data is stored at a location, and how it should be interpreted. After all, what we are really dealing with is a series of light switches. It is our interpretation of what those light switches mean that give us information. Nothing has really changed since our first tutorial.

This page was last updated on 05/30/05