Thread: Bit operations on different datatypes

Hello,

I've written som code that parses through an array of chars and performs bit operations on each char ( each byte).

Now what i would like to do is to reuse this code to parse through all of the bytes of an array of floats and perform those very same bit operations on each byte.

How to best go about this?

If i have my float array:

float* float_array = (float*)malloc(...);

can i then just do:

unsigned char* char_array = (unsigned char*)(float_array);

And just reuse my old code?

Any advice would be much appreciated! Thanks!

Hi Salem,

Well just for fun I've written a small bit compression algorithm (similar to Huffman coding) that identifies identical bytes or series of bytes and basically compresses these to a smaller size.

Now i believe this should be very possible to do on float arrays aswell on a byte by byte level. Does that make any sense to you?

Thank you for your reply.

Yes i believe that was John Carmack ( spelling? ) for reciprocal square root in Quake. However since 1999 x86 has faster built in functions (ref: Some Assembly Required » Blog Archive » Timing square root).

I've seen the code segment, there was a comment like // what the **ck?