Skew binary number system must be the first non-zero least significant digit. In this case 15 is written canonically as 1000. Skew binary representations of the numbers from 0 to 15 are shown in following table: The advantage of skew binary is that each increment operation can be done with at most one carry operation. This exploits the fact that formula_3. Incrementing a skew binary number is done by setting the only two to a zero and incrementing the next digit from zero to one or one to two. When numbers are represented using a form of run-length encoding as linked lists of the
Signed number representations as the largest positive number that can be represented, and vice versa if the word has an odd number of bits. The following table shows the positive and negative integers that can be represented using four bits. Same table, as viewed from "given these binary bits, what is the number as interpreted by the representation system": Google's Protocol Buffers "zig-zag encoding" is a system similar to sign-and-magnitude, but uses the least significant bit to represent the sign and has a single representation of zero. This allows a variable-length quantity encoding intended for nonnegative (unsigned) integers to be used efficiently for