Right way to show numbers in binary/hex/octal in your opinion?

[Paul Backus]

On Saturday, 25 December 2021 at 21:12:33 UTC, rempas wrote:
> The first one is negate the number and convert it to hex and 
> then add a "-" in front of the number. So the result will be: 
> -a (which is what my function does)

This is the correct result.

> The second one is what "printf" and "writef" does which is 
> using 2's complement. So in this case, we first convert the 
> number to binary using 2's complement and then we convert this 
> number to hex. In this example, `-10` to binary is 
> `1111111111110110` which is `fff6` in hex. However, for some 
> reason "printf" and "writef" return fffffff6 so go figure....

The two's complement representation of a number depends on the 
width of the integer type you're using. For the number -10, the 
16-bit two's complement is `fff6` and the 32-bit two's complement 
is `fffffff6`.

The website you link to in your post uses 16 bit integers, but D 
uses 32-bit `int`s by default. That's where the difference comes 
from.

> Anyway, I don't even know why it will be practical useful to 
> print a number in another system so, what are your thoughts?

If you implement the first method, users can still get the two's 
complement representation very easily with (for example) 
`cast(uint) -10`. On the other hand, if you implement the second 
method, it's a lot trickier to get the non-two's-complement 
result. So I think the first method is the better choice here.