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Section
04 Part 01 – Bit significance |
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“Whatever you do will be
insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.” ~Mahatma
Gandhi |
Introduction
I
think that before we tread into polarity territories, we should first look at
bit significance. This is very short and
real simple, so I’ll try not to drag it.
The least
significant bit
We’ll
take a byte and display it in binary:
|
0000 0001 |
You’ll
notice that all bits are 0 (clear) except for one. The bit that is furthest to the right, is 1
(set). And that is what is referred to
as the “least significant bit” (LSB for short, and will be used most often).
The most
significant bit
Likewise,
we’ll display another byte in binary:
|
1000 0000 |
Here,
you’ll notice that all bits are 0 (clear) except for the one that is further to
the left. That bit, is referred to as
the “most significant bit” (MSB for short, and is used most often).
Practical
use
You’ll
find that the terms “LSB” and “MSB” will be used multiple times in instruction
manuals, hardware manuals, other tutorials, and even for other languages that
perform binary manipulation. Hence the
reason I’m explaining the terminology here and now.
All
you need to remember, is that regardless of the size (be it byte, word, or
long-word), the bit furthest to the right is the LSB (least significant bit)
and the bit furthest to the left is the MSB (most significant bit).