One thing about two&#x27;s complement representation is the representation is asymmetric, you have one more negative number, i.e. 0x8000 for a 16 bit signed number is negative (unsigned) 0x8000.  So a function like absolute value if it returns a signed integer cannot handle all possible input values.  I think if you do any numeric processing using fixed point arithmetic you simply need to know the range is asymmetric for two&#x27;s complement rather than trying to pick a scheme like always using signed or unsigned.