Re: bitwise operations in Ada95

[Jacob Sparre Andersen <sparre@nbi.dk>]

Aquaman:

> My question would be for a way to do bit shifting operations (vs. & |)
> so for example shift left and shift right for use in mathmatical mult and div
> opperations

"*2" and "/2" works fine for me for that purpose (on modular
types).

Using packed arrays of booleans "(Bit_Pattern
(Bit_Pattern'First + 1 .. Bit_Pattern'Last), 0)" and "(1,
Bit_Pattern (Bit_Pattern'First .. Bit_Pattern'Last - 1))"
could be used. But I would hide them in functions, and maybe
allow shifting by more than one bit at a time.

I am certain that all current Ada compilers will implement
the first of these two solutions "the optimal way". I am not
so certain about the second, but it could easily be checked.

Anyway. The abstract concept you actually want to implement
seems to be "*2" and "/2", so why not just use that.

Jacob
-- 
"The point is that I am now a perfectly safe penguin!"