On Tue, 2003-10-07 at 11:22, Michael L Torrie wrote: > On Tue, 2003-10-07 at 10:21, Bryan Murdock wrote: > > Sorry, I was thinking hardware, where theoretically you could come up > > with whatever addressing scheme you want, but the most efficient schemes > > use _all_ the possible combinations of the bits you have available for > > your address, including 0 (or 00, or 000, etc.). > > Well, to follow your hardware idea, there is one's complement and two's > complement notation for integers. One is superior because it makes math > easier. Both could be used. In fact the originial cray's used one's > complement. Took extra circuitry to take into account the fact that > there are 2 zeros in the integer space, though. > > Anyway, counting from zero for addresses is just superior because it > makes the math consistent.
Like I said, you can dream up any number of ways of representing stuff with high and low voltages, but some just make a lot more sense than others, and some of that (too much? I personally don't think so ;) has just propogated right into the software world. Bryan ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
