How do you represent a negative number in binary? How do you represent 0 in Roman numerals? How do you represent a negative number in decimal? How do you represent a decimal number in decimal? Short answer, you can’t, so you have to cheat. — and . are not decimal numerals just as 0 is not a Roman numeral. Balanced ternary allows you to represent negative numbers without cheating, but as long as we use binary computers, we will have to cheat, and 2’s complement along with fixed sized integers is how we cheat.