next up previous
Next: Rational numbers. Up: How to encode the elements Previous: How to encode the elements

Integers.

One machine word can contain a SINGLE PRECISION INTEGER in the range [0, 2N - 1]. To represent integers outside of this range, so called MULTIPRECISION INTEGER, we use arrays of N-bit words. To be precise we consider the 2N-ary (or radix 2N) expansion of a nonzero integer:

a  =   (- 1)s $\displaystyle \Sigma_{{{0 \leq \i \leq n}}}^{{}}$ai2Ni (32)

where Then the integer a with (n + 1) 2N-digits can be represented by an array (of N-bit words) with length n + 3 since we need The reasonable UNIT OPERATION for integers is the the WORD OPERATION. One can easily check that


next up previous
Next: Rational numbers. Up: How to encode the elements Previous: How to encode the elements
Marc Moreno Maza
2003-06-06