John wrote:
I have two numbers a,b.
I would like to compare if most significant bit of a is
larger than most significant bit of b. Right now the code
I am using looks like this
int w1,w2;
asm("bsr %0,%1" : "=r" (w1) : "r" (a));
asm("bsr %0,%1" : "=r" (w2) : "r" (b));
return w1 < w2;
Anyone has any better ideas on how to do this. Seems
like this code is pretty slow. Is there an easier way
to compare the msb of two numbers? Maybe using one
assembly command? Or maybe by doing something else
compared to bsr?
Thanks,
--j
The safest method is to extract the most significant
bits and compare them. This becomes a bit tricky
with different bit-widths of variables and also
for Endianism.
In a header file, <limits.h>, is a symbol CHAR_BIT,
which defines the number of bits in the type char.
The "sizeof" operator will return the number of
units (of type char) of a type or structure.
Knowing this, the number of bits in an integer
can be found.
Let's define the most significant bit (MSB) as:
msb = 1 << ((sizeof(int) * CHAR_BIT) - 1)
which is a 1 left shifted to one less than the
number of bits in an integer.
The MSB can be isolated using this information
and the bitwise AND operator.
However, setting up the relationship in a truth
table yields:
---------+----------+-------
MSB of A | MSB of B | A > B
---------+----------+-------
0 | 0 | False (0)
---------+----------+-------
0 | 1 | False (0)
---------+----------+-------
1 | 0 | True (1)
---------+----------+-------
1 | 1 | False (0)
---------+----------+-------
result = msb_a AND NOT msb_b.
The implementation of this is left as an exercise
for the O.P.
--
Thomas Matthews
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