What is “2's Complement”?

Question

I\'m in a computer systems course and have been struggling, in part, with Two\'s Complement. I want to understand it but everything I\'ve read hasn\'t brought the p

Answer 1

I liked lavinio's answer, but shifting bits adds some complexity. Often there's a choice of moving bits while respecting the sign bit or while not respecting the sign bit. This is the choice between treating the numbers as signed (-8 to 7 for a nibble, -128 to 127 for bytes) or full-range unsigned numbers (0 to 15 for nibbles, 0 to 255 for bytes).