Heh, no, that actually ignores the issue [Wink]

What I'm talking about is (for example) binary representation of a negative number. Normally twos-complement - I don't think ones-complement is much used.

For example the offset for time zones is sometimes negative, which is stored in the registry as a twos-complement value.

That's why in my recommendation there is an optional word size - you need to know how wide the target is to construct a twos-complement value.