Do you know your bitwise operators?

I keep getting various parse errors like

    Expected assignment, comment or return statement but " " found.

When trying to get rid of parse errors, I did something like "return x" and it says

    Solution did not return correct output for x=1. Expected output: 1, got: 0

Which is clearly not right.

Just tried doing "return 1" and still got

    Solution did not return correct output for x=1. Expected output: 1, got: 0

I certainly can't get it to work. For the first problem, I tried:

  function one_bit(x) {
    return x & (x-1) == 0
  }

Only to see this error:

  Expected "}" or comment but "&" found.

WAT

Definitely.

  function one_bit(x) {
    return 1
  }

  Solution did not return correct output for x=1. Expected output: 1, got: 0

umm... ok

:(

Oops, i'll fix it.

Should be fixed now...

The only time I find myself using bit manipulations in production code is when I am writing a library that uses an int to represent a set of option flags (where each bit is a boolean flag). It's pretty common in C libs to define some constants like

    int FLAG_1 = 1;
    int FLAG_2 = 2;
    int FLAG_3 = 4; //These would actually probably be formatted like (1 << N) 
    ...

And then pass in your options to a function like f(... FLAG_1+FLAG_2) so you can have an optional number of flags in a single argument.

The first time I used bit manipulation in web apps was for declaring user roles and permissions. A single integer field in your database can be used to declare any combination of up to 32 different capabilities/permissions for users by setting the individual bits in the value. Also, when dealing with colors as an integer value, you can isolate your ARGB values using bit shifting.

To do this exercise in javascript is pretty silly. But as a systems developer, I can tell you that bit manipulation happens all over the place in my line of work.

- Packing lots of small pieces of information into a single memory word - for example, 3-3-2 bit RGB [1]

- Interacting with hardware that uses certain bits in a register to control behavior - for example, Arduino digital ports [2]

- Doing arithmetic extra-fast with numbers that are powers of two - modulo becomes bitwise-and, division and multiplication become shifts

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_monochrome_and_RGB_pale...

[2] http://arduino.cc/en/Reference/PortManipulation

This is mostly done in lower level code, so no wonder you have never bumped into it. One easy example, though is passing a set of binary options around, which is useful, for example, when you want to say "enable those features, and disable those other features". You can pack up to 32 options into a 4-byte integer.

real world application: https://github.com/facebook/hhvm/blob/master/hphp/compiler/a...

Embedded applications use bitwise ops all the time. Particularly for performing changes to registers.

Example, a microcontroller has an 8 bit status register. Each bit controls some hardware function. You wish to change bit 5, but you can't change anything else because it would cause unwanted side effects. So this rules out simply saying myregister = 0b00001000.

Common solution is to make a macro like:

#define setbit(BYTE,BIT) BYTE |= (1 << BIT)

Thus you can say I want to set bit 5 in my register by calling setbit(foo, 5) while keeping the rest of the byte intact. There are analogous macros for clearing and toggling bits.

Or you might want to perform an operation based on a particular bit in a byte, e.g. byte 5 is a status flag that tells you when a timer has overflowed.

#define getbit(BYTE, BIT) !!(BYTE & ~(1 << BIT))

Then you can say:

if( getbit(myregister, 5)){ // do something }

Fun fun :)

JavaScript supports various bit manipulation operators, which treat their operands as 32 bits (and return a numerical value).

That would work if the `>>>` operator worked as expected, but actually it just looks at the first 5 bits of the second variable so that `a>>>b` is effectively equivalent to `a>>>(b&31)`. His description of it is wrong.

http://jsfiddle.net/Ayzkt/2/

Sorry. Fixed.