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Chance and "flavors" of 0 | 393 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Plus or minus zero
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, July 10 2013 @ 05:03 AM EDT
It's normal to distinguish between +0.0 and -0.0 in floating-point arithmetic.
I've never knowingly come across computer hardware that distinguishes between +0
and -0 in representing integers though the C standard is written to allow such
representations so presumably such hardware existed at some time.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Apple seems to have misled the court
Authored by: bprice on Wednesday, July 10 2013 @ 05:08 AM EDT
on some computers you can actually test for and tell the difference between +0 and -0 (one's complement arithmetic.)
Not just ones complement — there's also signed-magnitude, used by many early computers (and at least one still on the market, last time I looked), as well as most people. When you write -1, you're using it.

---
--Bill. NAL: question the answers, especially mine.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Chance and "flavors" of 0
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, July 10 2013 @ 05:24 AM EDT
In maths, 0 is NEVER signed.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Apple seems to have misled the court
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, July 11 2013 @ 12:15 AM EDT
On one system I've used -0 is used to represent "infinity" [when
printer]; I can't remember now how many bytes it used for fixed point
arithmetic, but as an example, if it had been 2 bytes (16 bits), -0 would
represent 32767 + 1 which is the same [bit pattern] as -32767 - 1.

cm

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Signed zeros are part of the IEEE 754 floating point standard
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, July 11 2013 @ 12:19 PM EDT
If the hardware (as in most modern floating point hardware) supports the IEEE floating point standards then signed zeros must be available. However, as the second Wikipedia points out that you probably will not see it without special effort.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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