I'm reading up on bitwise operators, complements, and two's complements, and I'm wondering why the lower limit of a range (aka lowest negative number) isn't all zeroes in binary, and the upper limit isn't all ones.
For example, for 8 bit integers, why don't we represent -128
as 0000 0000
, -127
as 0000 0001
, -1
as 0111 1111
, 0
as 1000 0000
, and +127
as 1111 1111
?
0111 1111
being+127
and1000 0000
being-128
to be rather confusing`. $\endgroup$ – popedotninja Jul 31 '19 at 17:01