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[fitsbits] Proposed Changes to the FITS Standard
Since a couple people have already questioned the proposed change to the
FITS Standard to replace the term "twos-complement" with "two's complement" here is a bit more information to consider. For what it is worth, this is consistent with Wikipedia which defines the term as "two's complement" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two's_complement). Under the "discussion" tab on that page there is some justification for this usage. Below is a copy of the relevant text. Note in particular the explanation for the different position of the apostrophe in "ones' complement" and "two's complement". Bill Pence -------------------------------------------- "Two's" and "ones'" complements? Searching [with Google] for twos complement and ones complement, with any of the three candidate punctuations, shows that the majority of the first page of results for any candidate punctuation are punctuated the way we have it: two's and ones'. My rationale is that Knuth does it that way, and has a good explanation for his choice, so let's follow the leader. But if everybody else also does it that way, that's good for us too. --Quuxplusone 06:09, 8 February 2007 (UTC) 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 number is complemented with respect to a long sequence of 1s. (Volume 2, p. 203, according to [1]) -------------------------------------- |
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