Re: Swap two integers without using temporary variable

From:
James Kanze <james.kanze@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Fri, 30 Nov 2007 01:23:53 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID:
<ef98a3f3-75f9-4045-853c-1e5f86057381@r60g2000hsc.googlegroups.com>
On Nov 29, 7:21 pm, Joe Greer <jgr...@doubletake.com> wrote:

Kai-Uwe Bux <jkherci...@gmx.net> wrote
innews:fimnp4$jb1$1@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU:

  After all, many compilers detect quite some idioms. For example
  many
compilers detect that something like "a = (a << 8) | (a >> 24);"
is actually a rotation and compile that as one single opcode.


That's because such an expression is *always* a rotation.


old C books say that it is shift,is the behavoir changed since then?


I thaught a << 8 is a shift and a >> 24 is a shift. So,

  ( a << 8 ) | ( a >> 24 )

would be a rotation assuming a bitlength of 32.


Yes. I just sort of assumed that (and that everyone else would,
since it seems so obvious).

[snip]


I don't know about now, but in the olden days, << always 0
filled and >> was machine dependent.


It depends on the type. As a general rule, I only use shifts
and bitwise operators on unsigned types, so there are no
problems.

Juha's expression is wide-spread, and is the idiomatic way to
express a rotation in C/C++. It would, I believe, be
immediately recognized as a rotation by anyone who has worked on
code where rotations were needed. (It's used in the reference
implementations of MD5 and SHA1, for example.)

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