Signed Variations
Signed decimal values may be represented in several ways. The COBOL programming language, for example, supports a total of five zoned decimal formats, each one encoding the numeric sign in a different way:
| Type | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Unsigned | No sign nibble | F1 F2 F3 |
| Signed trailing (canonical format) | Sign nibble in the last (least significant) byte | F1 F2 C3 |
| Signed leading (overpunch) | Sign nibble in the first (most significant) byte | C1 F2 F3 |
| Signed trailing separate | Separate sign character byte ('+' or '−') following the digit bytes |
F1 F2 F3 2B |
| Signed leading separate | Separate sign character byte ('+' or '−') preceding the digit bytes |
2B F1 F2 F3 |
Read more about this topic: Binary-coded Decimal, Representational Variations
Famous quotes containing the words signed and/or variations:
“Bernstein: “Girls delightful in Cuba stop. Could send you prose poems about scenery but don’t feel right spending your money stop. There is no war in Cuba. Signed Wheeler.” Any answer?
Charles Foster Kane: Yes—Dear Wheeler, You provide the prose poems, I’ll provide the war.”
—Orson Welles (1915–1985)
“I may be able to spot arrowheads on the desert but a refrigerator is a jungle in which I am easily lost. My wife, however, will unerringly point out that the cheese or the leftover roast is hiding right in front of my eyes. Hundreds of such experiences convince me that men and women often inhabit quite different visual worlds. These are differences which cannot be attributed to variations in visual acuity. Man and women simply have learned to use their eyes in very different ways.”
—Edward T. Hall (b. 1914)