Why can't I xor strings?

[Grant Edwards]

On 2004-10-11, Jeremy Bowers <jerf at jerf.org> wrote:

> With respect, this isn't something to doubt or not doubt.
> There is one, and only one, way to represent any positive
> number in base two, since encoding sign is not an issue.
> Assuming an extra bit to show sign, there is one and only one
> way to represent any negative number, too.

That's news to me.  I've used three different base-2
representations for negative numbers in the past week, and I
can think of at least one other one I've used in the past.

> (Zero gets to be the exception since then you can have
> positive and negative zero,

That depends on which base-2 representation you've chosen. In
two's compiliment and excess-N representations, there is only
one zero value.  In signed-magnitude there may be two.

-- 
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