Re: C++ Primer ex 7.3

From:
 James Kanze <james.kanze@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Sat, 11 Aug 2007 05:27:01 -0700
Message-ID:
<1186835221.630247.290730@w3g2000hsg.googlegroups.com>
On Aug 10, 12:57 pm, Frank Birbacher <bloodymir.c...@gmx.net> wrote:

    [...]

What I don't understand is why the dopped bit is not looked at in each
iteration. I thought of:

while(n>0)
{
        if( n & 1 )
                r *= m;
        m *= m;
        n >>= 1;
}


Because I typed the code in too fast, and only tested it with
some simple values for which it happened to work.

you said "n = -n" in if clause, so how can "n" still be a -ve number ?


There is a negative int number "n" such that "-n" is too large to be
represented. It happens to usually come out as n again. That is "n ==
-n" is true (technically it is still undefined behaviour as James
already said).


And of course, it depends on the implementation. It's only a
problem on machines using 2's complement---it works fine with
1's complement and signed magnitude. Of course, off hand, I
only know of one, relatively exotic mainframe that uses 1's
complement today, and as far as I know, the last signed
magnitude machine went out of production some years ago. So
it's probably a safe bet that the machine he's programming on
uses 2's complement.

--
James Kanze (GABI Software) email:james.ka...@gmail.com
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