Please don't reply with "Subject:...Digest..." On 2017-03-20, at 17:45, Steve Smith wrote:
> Two's-complement is an amazingly great way for binary computers to store > negative numbers. It is not so great for humans to read or write. First > of all, you have to know where the sign bit is, and X expressions are > ambiguous. If you watch carefully, you'll see that HLASM (almost) always > left-fills to 32 bits (with 0s), so if you intend to specify -1, then you > must write X'FFFFFFFF'. > Why not just write -1? > It would have been nice if different conventions were chosen back in the > dark ages, instead of conflating X strings with hex numbers. But it isn't > nice, and you might as well learn how it works, and learn to live with it. > The consequences of that have pervaded this thread. -- gil
