I already know the concept of negative binary numbers, The 0 at the position most significant bit represents that the binary is positive and 1 at the position of most significant bit represents that the binary is negative.
BUT THE PROBLEM THAT INTIMIDATED ME TO ASK A QUESTION ON STACKOVERFLOW IS THIS: what about the times that we might want to represent a huge number that it's representation has occurred to have 1 in msb.
let me explain it in this way: by considering the above rule for making negative counterparts of our binary numbers we could say that ;
in an 8-bit system we have, For example, a value of positive 12 (decimal) would be written as 00001100 in binary, but negative 12 (decimal) would be written as
10001100 but what makes me confused a bit is that 10001100 could also be interpreted as 268 in decimal while we know that its the negative form of 12 in binary using this method of conversion.
I just want to know how to deal with this tricky, two-faced possible ways of interpreting a binary number, just like the example i gave above(it seem's to be negative, OH! but wait it might also not be:).
It depends on the type you use. If you're using an 8-bit representation which is signed, then the largest number you can store is 1111111 (i.e. the first bit is set aside).
In our example, that would convert to an integer value of 127.
If you use an unsigned type, then you have the extra bit available, allowing you to store 11111111, or 255 expressed as an integer.
A strongly typed language with a good compiler should catch you trying to assign, say, 134 to a signed 8 bit integer and vomit errors all over you.
If you're doing something strange fiddling around with bits yourself, you're on your own! There's no way of reconstructing, post hoc, whether it was intended to be a negative or a large positive, so you'll have to choose a system and stick with it.
The general convention nowadays is to stick with signed representations always - although I have seen code (usually for extreme compute tasks like astrophysical calculations) use unsigned values simply to save memory. And of course images will use unsigned values by convention, usually.