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If the user wants to push -10 onto the stack.
Would I do "10 OP_NEGATE" ?
Or could I convert it to the hex value by doing 0x80 + 10 = 0X8A ?
How would I push a negative number with OPCODES onto the stack?
Answers
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Both will work. OP_NEGATE simply XORs with 0x80, so you can also directly push the result.
And we take the absolute value of a signed integer right? In this case 10 could be written with one byte so I think that using two bytes was overkill? – Kyle Graham – 2018-05-06T09:30:40.390
Not necessarily. Some operations, like hashing, will produce different results for positive or negative numbers. Some operations, like signatures, will fail if the R value is negative. It depends on what you're doing. – Raghav Sood – 2018-05-06T14:08:55.297
1Take into account that for numbers between -1 and 16 inclusive, short 1-byte opcodes exist. Pushing any other number (like -10) requires an explicit push operation of the bytes encoding of the number. Both "10 NEGATE" and "-10" are therefore 2-byte scripts. – Pieter Wuille – 2018-05-06T23:45:48.093