sign
sign A means used to distinguish between positive and negative numbers. In a computer there are a number of ways of representing the sign of a number, each of which makes use of a single bit called the sign bit. The most obvious way of representing positive and negative integers in computer words is by means of the signed-magnitude (or sign-and-magnitude) representation. Here, the leftmost bit in a word is used to denote the sign (0 for + and 1 for –) and the remaining bits in the word are used to represent the magnitude of the integer. It is more usual, however, for a computer to use the two's complement representation of integers. See radix complement, complement number system.
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