The equivalent of this would be if you had 8 decimal digits with which to represent a number. In this case, we could represent 100,000,000
values, ranging from 0
to 99,999,999
. As we counted up, we would have:
0
1
2
3
...
99,999,997
99,999,998
99,999,999
???
Since we don't have another digit to represent 100,000,000
, what is the best course of action? We can't keep incrementing to 100,000,000
because that would require another digit we don't have. To make this work, we'd have to drop the 1
and get 00,000,000
. This is still meaningful if we keep in mind that this number now represents 100,000,000
+ whatever its value is. In this way, you can keep counting and the value remains at least somewhat meaningful:
99,999,998
99,999,999
00,000,000 represents 100,000,000
00,000,001 represents 100,000,001
00,000,002 represents 100,000,002
...
If we instead dropped the least significant digit (the 0 on the right), we would have:
99,999,998
99,999,999
10,000,000 ???
10,000,001 ???
There's no point in continuing to count because our number doesn't make sense anymore.