Low Level Bit Hacks You Absolutely Must Know

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June 30, 2009, 21:10

vik, nice trick. The way I count in binary is I add powers of two quickly. For example: 1110101 is 64 + 32 + (16 + 4) + 1 = 96 + 20 + 1 = 116 + 1 = 117. Your trick is much quicker tho. I am going to master it!

Matt, thanks, I had 'b' everywhere before I turned into 'bits'. Corrected now!

Justin, I was inspired by "Hacker's Delight" book. It calls them all hacks because they come from MIT where this term was coined and these operations were originally considered very smart programming tricks thus hacks. I decided to honor MIT and the book and called them hacks in my article as well.

techninja42, great to find that you found them immediately useful!

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