Understanding the ~ bitwise operator

Asked Nov 23 '19 at 14:55

Active Nov 23 '19 at 15:09

Viewed 43 times

The documentation says:

The unary ~ (invert) operator yields the bitwise inversion of its plain or long integer argument.

I'm understanding this as: "the invert operator should invert each bit." So 8 in binary is 1000, so to me ~8 should be 0111 or 7, but instead ~8 is -9. So how in the world is the inversion of 1000 -9?

edited Nov 23 '19 at 15:07

John Kugelman

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asked Nov 23 '19 at 14:55

tayler6000

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two%27s_complement – tkausl Nov 23 '19 at 15:00
Do a little digging into the topic of the *two's complement* representation of integers. – High Performance Mark Nov 23 '19 at 15:00
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@Tripleee The duplicate doesn't contain anything about `~` used in this context. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7278779/bit-wise-operation-unary-invert might be more relevant. – Thierry Lathuille Nov 23 '19 at 15:03

Understanding the ~ bitwise operator

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