Binary number through each symbol, in increasing order. Before examining binary counting, it is useful to briefly discuss the more familiar decimal counting system as a frame of reference. Decimal counting uses the ten symbols "0" through "9". Counting begins with the incremental substitution of the least significant digit (rightmost digit) which is often called the "first digit". When the available symbols for this position are exhausted, the least significant digit is reset to "0", and the next digit of higher significance (one position to the left) is incremented ("overflow"), and incremental substitution of the low-order digit resumes. This method of reset
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