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In most computers, the carry from the most significant bit of an arithmetic operation (or bit shifted out from a shift operation) is placed in a special carry bit which can be used as a carry-in for multiple precision arithmetic or tested and used to control execution of a computer program. The same carry bit is also generally used to indicate ...
In computer programming, a bitwise operation operates on a bit string, a bit array or a binary numeral (considered as a bit string) at the level of its individual bits. It is a fast and simple action, basic to the higher-level arithmetic operations and directly supported by the processor. Most bitwise operations are presented as two-operand ...
An especially useful bit operation is count leading zeros used to find the high set bit of a machine word, though it may have different names on various architectures. [1] There's no simple programming language idiom, so it must be provided by a compiler intrinsic or system library routine.
The formal definition of an arithmetic shift, from Federal Standard 1037C is that it is: . A shift, applied to the representation of a number in a fixed radix numeration system and in a fixed-point representation system, and in which only the characters representing the fixed-point part of the number are moved.
A bit field is distinguished from a bit array in that the latter is used to store a large set of bits indexed by integers and is often wider than any integral type supported by the language. [ citation needed ] Bit fields, on the other hand, typically fit within a machine word , [ 3 ] and the denotation of bits is independent of their numerical ...
The carry flag is set according to this addition, and subtract with carry computes a+not(b)+C, while subtract without carry acts as if the carry bit were set. The result is that the carry bit is set if a≥b, and clear if a<b. The System/360, [3] ARM, POWER/PowerPC, 6502, MSP430, COP8, Am29000, i960, and 88000 processors use this convention.
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Some programming languages such as Lisp, Python, Perl, Haskell, Ruby and Raku use, or have an option to use, arbitrary-precision numbers for all integer arithmetic. Although this reduces performance, it eliminates the possibility of incorrect results (or exceptions) due to simple overflow.