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From: hunt@spar.SPAR.SLB.COM (Neil Hunt)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Printing binary (was: Re: Why college?)
Message-ID: <1668@spar.SPAR.SLB.COM>
Date: Mon, 26-Oct-87 12:36:55 EST
Article-I.D.: spar.1668
Posted: Mon Oct 26 12:36:55 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 29-Oct-87 00:00:13 EST
References: <35@ateng.UUCP> <3194@sol.ARPA> <2783@xanth.UUCP>
Reply-To: hunt@spar.UUCP (Neil Hunt)
Organization: Schlumberger Palo Alto Research - CASLAB
Lines: 28

In article <2034@gryphon.CTS.COM> greg@gryphon.CTS.COM (Greg Laskin) writes:
>In article <1646@spar.SPAR.SLB.COM> hunt@spar.UUCP (Neil Hunt) writes:
>>This is crying out for recursion:
>>	void
>>	print_binary(value, bits)
>>	int value, bits;
>>	{
>>		if(--bits > 0)
>>			print_binary(value >> 1, bits);
>>		putchar((value & 0x1) + '0');
>>	}
>>
>Why would this cry out to incur the additional overhead of recursion
>just to flip the order of the bits around when you could easily pick
>the bits off the left side and use a simple loop to do the job?

I knew that someone would ask this.  Check out all the stuff that has to happen
to get the binary bits displayed on the screen, or written to a file, and see
if building a new stack frame 31 times is a significant penalty.  One of the
basic rules about writing code is only to sacrifice clarity for efficiency
when it will make a difference !

>
>Pretty algorithm though.

Thankyou !

Neil/.