How many bits dword

Its a binary OR operation. In cases like your example its usually used to implement flags. NET Addin for the Subversion version control system. Ok, now, what are the flags? They obviously have to hold some value 0 or 1? How exactly is that assigned? Thanks again for your patience! Each flag has a different bit set. Colin Jeanne A flag is a value that a function looks at to determine what it should be doing. Arild Fines showed how a function checks to see if a flag is set in the function.

Flags are defined by whoever writes the function, usually they are assigned powers of two because when you OR them together powers of two wont affect each other. For AND, both bits must be 1 to return 1 or it will return 0. I''m sure you already figured that though Invader X Invader''s Realm. Giving an actual bit count is the best approach "The file begins with a bit binary integer describing Curiously, you can write a bit value into rax, then read off the low 32 bits from eax, or the low 16 bitx from ax, or the low 8 bits from al--it's just one register, but they keep on extending it!

Here's the full list of x86 registers. The 64 bit registers are shown in red. This negative high bit is called the "sign bit", and it has a negative value in two's complement signed numbers. This means to represent -1, for example, you set not only the high bit, but all the other bits as well: in unsigned, this is the largest possible value. The reason binary represents -1 is the same reason you might choose to represent -1 on a 4-digit odometer: if you add one, you wrap around and hit zero.

A very cool thing about two's complement is addition is the same operation whether the numbers are signed or unsigned--we just interpret the result differently. Subtraction is also identical for signed and unsigned. Ask Question. Asked 13 years, 2 months ago. Active 2 years, 5 months ago. Viewed k times. Improve this question. Haim Bender Haim Bender 7, 9 9 gold badges 49 49 silver badges 54 54 bronze badges.

Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. The next bit to the left is more significant by a factor of two. When that bit is "set" it represents the value of two. So suppose you have a number formed with two bits. Then the number in binary can be 00 or 01 or 10 or The equivalent in decimal is 0, 1, 2 and 3 respectively. Bytes words and dwords Bytes words and dwords are the basic chunks of data used in programming.

The processor will work with the data size to suit the instruction it is executing. A byte is 8 bits, a word is 16 bits 2 bytes and a dword is 32 bits 4 bytes.