Thread: Mistake in the site's FAQ

Originally Posted by quzah

Well, if it was portable, it would in theory be faster than the modulus version. Bitwise operators tend to be faster than division and modulus. That's why people used to use shifting for division by two instead of the division operator.


Quzah.

I agree with that, I had actually thought of it after I posted, but didn't bother editting my post as I'm sure someone has already seen it.

Good for you. I don't think anyone here really cares though. But if you're still unsure, guess what? Lots of people here use "void main" and stuff like "fflush( stdin )". However, that doesn't mean they're right.


Quzah.

The AND trick works on any system that uses 2's complement negative numbers or a simpe sign bit. Which is most of today's systems, but there are some 1's complement around, where the trick fails for negative numbers.

But it's completely unnecessary, because every compiler worth its salt will replace (x % 2) by (x & 1) if it knows that the platform doesn't use 1's complement.