So are you asking for a mixture of a negative sign which applies to decimal formatted numbers with hexadecimal characters? I have never, ever seen a hexadecimal number written that way before.
That was my first thing that crossed my mind 'I have never seen negative hexadecimal numbers'
If the number is related to hardware it is impossible (I think) If it is just a number I think it will be very confusing to have negative hexadecimal numbers.
But is it more understandable or readable to humans if no one has ever seen it used that way before? I'd say know. Please show me some reference where there was as "negative" hexadecimal number used like that before. Would it even be possible to show certain numbers that have some ambiguous meaning? Suppose you have a signed 8-bit integer. Someone would try to show something has - FF. What would that possibly mean?
<Someone would try to show something has - FF. What would that possibly mean?
-1*-1 = 1
Here's my main point against the idea. Every time I want to see hexidecimal display, it is because I want to know what the bits are. When I care about what the value actually means, I use decimal display. So a minus sign makes absolutely no sense when looking at the bits.
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"So a minus sign makes absolutely no sense when looking at the bits." no problem, I agree with you ... but i'm not looking at the bits, i only talking about a different format to display a negative number
And where have you actually had a need to show a negative hexidecimal number?
There are only two ways to tell somebody thanks: Kudos and Marked Solutions Unofficial Forum Rules and Guidelines "Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God" - 2 Corinthians 3:5
ouadi is right insofar as hex math is a real thing, and it makes total sense to do arithmetic in hex. Programmers never work in it. Mathematicians do. Hex floating point also makes sense... "A3.56EeE" is a perfectly valid number (you have to be very careful about your case to differentiate a value "E" from the symbol for "exponent", but it works). It doesn't exist in any programming environment I've ever seen.
So, ouadi's request is not unreasonable. But it would affect such a small slice of LV users that I don't thnk it would ever be something NI would work on.
You could relatively easily create your own XControl that does this, both for control and indicator. Just use a string control and "If value is negative, append negative sign, then append the absolute value of the integer as hex." Use the Mantissa And Exponent primitive if you want to do similar work for floating point values. (I'm not sure about the manipulation of fixed-point numbers, but I think the APIs exist.)
Python does this, the sign and the radix are separate entities as they mathematically should be. I do not think you need an option, signed integers should simply show the sign and unsigned ones not.
