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Engineering LibreTexts

14.9: Chapter Summary

  • Page ID
    46311
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    Pharo uses 2’s complement encoding for its internal small integer representation and supports bit manipulation of their internal representation. This is useful when we want to speed up algorithms using simple encoding. We have reviewed the following points:

    • Numerical values use complement to encode their negative value.
    • Shifting a bit to the left multiple is equivalent to multiply it by 2, modulo the maximum value of its encoding size.
    • On the opposite, shifting a bit to the right divides it by 2.
    • Bits operations can be performed on any numerical values.
    • Complement are useful to turn an addition into a subtraction, thus simplifying the operation.
    • SmallInteger are coded on 31 bits on Pharo.

    Note that Pharo supports large numbers whose limit in size is mainly the memory you have at your disposal.


    This page titled 14.9: Chapter Summary is shared under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Alexandre Bergel, Damien Cassou, Stéphane Ducasse, Jannik Laval (Square Bracket Associates) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.