bitsize?

[David C. Ullrich]

Will Ware wrote:

> David C. Ullrich (ullrich at math.okstate.edu) wrote:
> >     Some comments of mine in the past have been misinterpreted
> > as requests for changes when they really were not that at all.
> > Here otoh I have a request: It would be nice if there was a
> > builtin "bitsize" function returning the number of bits in a
> > long value. (Ie ceil(log_2(n)), more or less).
>
> This may never make it into the core distribution, but it wouldn't
> be too hard to implement this in a private build.

    Thanks. One problem with that is that I don't know any C.
Well, I'm certain I could figure out enough C if I could just find
a compiler<g> - the other problem is that then I'd have to
distribute the private build with the application.

    I bet there'd be more of a demand for this if it already
existed: you don't want it unless you're doing numerical
things with longs, and you're not doing that because you
can't because there's no bitsize. (Maybe not.)

DU