Other Systems
Google's Protocol Buffers "zig-zag encoding" is a system similar to sign-and-magnitude, but uses the least significant bit to represent the sign and has a single representation of zero. This has the advantage to make variable-length quantity encoding efficient with signed integers.
Apache Thrift is another such method developed by Facebook in 2007 that is similar to Protocol Buffers for scalable cross-language services development and to serialize the data in efficient way.
Another approach is to give each digit a sign, yielding the signed-digit representation. For instance, in 1726, John Colson advocated reducing expressions to "small numbers", numerals 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. In 1840, Augustin Cauchy also expressed preference for such modified decimal numbers to reduce errors in computation.
Read more about this topic: Signed Number Representations
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—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
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—Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)