Can you explain what is meant by signed numbers in programming?

Signed numbers in programming are numbers that can take both positive and negative values. To represent them in memory, an additional bit for the sign is usually used (for example, the most significant bit in a binary number).

In Java, signed data types include int, long, short, byte. They use two's complement for encoding negative numbers.

For example, the number -1 in 8-bit signed representation appears as 11111111, and the number 1 as 00000001.

This allows arithmetic operations with negative and positive numbers to be performed uniformly.