Talk:Signed number representations

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[edit] One's versus ones' complement

According to the Bible, one's complement should be properly called ones' complement:

Detail-oriented readers and copy editors should notice the position of the apostrophe in terms like "two's complement" and "ones' complement": A two's complement number is complemented with respect to a single power of 2; while a ones' complement is complemented with respect to a long sequence of 1s. (TAOCP, Volume 2: Seminumerical Algorithms, chapter 4.1)

Although Google seems to imply that "one's complement" is used often (but it is hard to compare, as AFAIK you cannot force Google to consider punctuation), Knuth's view seems logical at the very least. -- Mormegil 19:56, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)

OK, no reaction, so I have changed it in the article. --Mormegil 15:59, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I'm not sure it's so obvious, despite what Knuth says in the bible. Google can distinguish "one's complement" versus ("ones' complement" or "ones complement"). The first gets 35,700 hits versus 13,500 for the others. (Also, judging from the first page of excerpts, "ones" predominates over "ones' "). For comparison, "two's" gives 69,700 versus 28,600 for twos'/twos. The tens and nines complements are fairly evenly split (and few). -R. S. Shaw 19:40, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

All the computer engineering textbooks and computer/CPU manuals in my not-so-modest collection use either "ones/twos complement" (i.e., no apostrophes at all) or "one's/two's complement" (i.e., "common" non-Knuth). M. Morris Mano's book Digital Design (1984) generally refers to "r's complement", r being the radix. --Wernher 20:55, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

Based on the idea that an encyclopedia should be correct, I've changed all instances of "one's complement [sic]" to "ones' complement" again. --Quuxplusone 02:01, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

I came to this talk page pondering about the grammar issue. Interesting. –– Constafrequent ^{(talk page)} 15:32, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Redirects

I had a hard time finding this page for information about ones complement. Maybe the "ones complement" and "one's complement" pages could redirect to this page, since those were the ones I tried. I ended up going through a few complement redirect pages to find this.

Well, "one's complement" already redirects here, as does "ones' complement". I suppose adding one more wouldn't hurt, and could help people find information more easily, so I added "ones complement". --Rick Sidwell 00:49, 14 September 2005 (UTC)