Q. What do you mean by Double Word?
A double word is precisely what its name implies, two words. Thus, a double word quantity is 32 bits. Logically, this double word can be divided into a high order word and a low order word, four bytes, or eight nibbles.
The Double words can represent all kinds of different data. It may be as
- an unsigned double word in the range of 0 => 4,294,967,295,
- a signed double word in the range -2,147,483,648 => 2,147,483,647,
- a 32-bit floating point value
- any data that requires 32 bits or less.
We will number each bit as follows:
- The rightmost bit in a binary number is bit position zero.
- Each bit to the left is given the next successive bit number.
Bit zero is typically referred to as the LSB (least significant bit). The left-most bit is usually called the MSB (most significant bit). We'll pass on to the intermediate bits by their respective bit numbers.