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Subject: Re: The idee looks nice. What do you think about n xor (n-2)?

Author: Landon Rabern

Date: 12:51:56 07/02/01

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On July 01, 2001 at 22:37:16, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On July 01, 2001 at 10:40:42, stefan wrote:
>
>>But why not n xor (n-1)?
>>
>>Thanks for your comment.
>
>
>N & N-1 is a well-known trick to clear the rightmost bit of a number.  IE
>if you take the value 7, then 7 & 6 is 6 (rightmost bit now off).  Repeating,
>you have 6 left.  6 & 5 is 4.  and finally, 4 & 3 is zero and they are all
>now off, being cleared one at a time.
>
>XOR N and N-1 doesn't seem to do anything useful in the context of bitmaps.
>
>IE if you start off with 7, 7^6 is 1 (the right bit.)  If you repeat this
>with 6, 6^5 is 3, which doesn't seem important.

It just set all the bits up to the first 1 bit and clears all higher bits.
Whether or not tis is useful is another question.


>
>XOR N and N-2 is just another boolean operation.
>
>7^5 is 2 (next to rightmost bit set).
>
>15 ^ 13 is 2 (next to rightmost bit set)
>
>If you need to get to the second bit, then this seems to do the trick.
>I don't need that in any of my code however, so I don't see why any of it
>is relevant here.
>
>The first thing to do when playing with bitmaps is to figure out what features
>you need.  Then find cute ways to discover that feature.  You should not start
>out discovering all the crypto tricks with bit twiddling and then try to figure
>out how they might be used in a bitmap engine..



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