on 29-Aug-2019 04:32
The & operator returns 1 every time 1 is also compared to 1 and zero for 1 compared to anything else:
Keep this in mind as we're going to use it in our code.
Let's take decimal 5 as our example.
5 in binary is 0101:
When we ask Python to right shift 5, python will do this operation in binary:
The above is the same as moving 0101 (5 in decimal) to the right so it's now 0010 (2 in decimal).
If you move 2 one bit to the left it's 4 because when we move the one from 0010 it's now 0100:
You need to know this because our while loop will exit when we keep right shifting 5 and its value reaches 0.
Our little code here will count the number of binary 1's given a decimal number as input using right shift operation previously described.
Our while loop ends when number = 0 and counter variable increments every time least significant bit = 1. Easy eh?
Let's use 5 as an example. A better way to understand it is to think of our code like this:
After we discard "1", we repeat the above with 0010 and so on, until we number = 0.
Let's run it but we already know that the number of 1's in 5 (0101 in binary) is 2:
In case you didn't understand yet you can follow along the bonus section with step by step explanation about the code.
counter variable starts at 0 and we enter the while loop as variable number (5) is not yet zero.
counter = 0
number = 5
The first operation will be number (5) & 1 or 0101 & 0001 in binary:
so counter is now whatever it was (0) plus 1, so counter = 1.
Next, we shift number variable (currently 5) by 1:
We now come back to our while loop again and because number is still not zero yet we keep going.
counter = 1
number = 2
The first operation will be number (2) & 1 or 0010 & 0001 in binary:
so counter is now whatever it was (1) plus 0, so counter does not change (still 1).
Next, we shift number again (currently 2) by 1:
Now we've got the following:
counter = 1
number = 1
The first operation will be number (1) & 1 or 0001 & 0001 in binary:
so counter is now whatever it was (1) plus 1, so counter is now 2.
We shift number again (currently 1) by 1:
We come back to our while loop again but this time we exit because number is now 0 and we return counter (2).
This is the result our code again: