RE: Bitwise operations and binary number

[Philippe Lhoste <PhiLho@...>]

nerurin@hotmail.com wrote:
> I wonder if Lua supports binary number and bitwise operations or not.
[snip]
> I do aware there is alternative to archive this. But I am just 
> interested in whether binary number works in Lua or not.

Basically, Lua doesn't support bitwise operations. I asked often to add them
(in the core, not in the libraries), as it is not so hard to do but need to
manage some other special characters if we want to have the same syntax as in
C. That's probably the reason why my plea is rejected. That, and the fact
that basically, Lua works on float numbers, so isn't much bitwise oriented. But
having this natively would allow some operations on binary files, for
example.

Otherwise, Reuben Thomas (http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~rrt/) wrote a library
for performing bitwise operations, that's exactly what you are looking for.

And despite what I wrote some time ago, bitwise operations can be done on
pure Lua. I began to write some routines to play with this (since Jean-Claude
Wippler asked if it is possible for its MD5 routines), but it is currently a
sleeping project. Quite operational, but some bugs are still crawling, as I
don't handle signed numbers very well. I will revive this project after some
others (the syntax highlighting of Lua in HTML, among others...).

Of course, my routines are more a proof of concept that real useful code,
since it is slow and memory consuming: I transform numbers in arrays of 1 and
0... I wrote a kind of "binary data" type, allowing, multiples operations
without breaking down numbers each time, but I will write also the operations as
taking one or two numbers and converting them back and forth on the fly.
As I said, not very usable, except perhaps for very small use (like needing
to apply a mask once in a program).

Regards.

-- 
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Philippe Lhoste (Paris -- France)
Professional programmer and amateur artist
http://jove.prohosting.com/~philho/
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