Why can't I xor strings?

[Jeremy Bowers]

On Mon, 11 Oct 2004 19:35:55 +0000, Grant Edwards wrote:

> I don't know what you mean.  Two's compliment, one's
> compliment, signed-magnitude, and excess-N _all_ use a single
> bit for sign.

I meant a single bit exclusively for sign, such that 

1 00001001

and 

0 00001001

are the same absolute value. The complements don't work that way. I
guess that does leave a question for whether 1 is positive or negative,
but for the purposes of my point, that doesn't matter much.