PROPOSAL: Binary Literals (original) (raw)

Mark Thornton mthornton at optrak.co.uk
Wed Mar 25 15:02:10 PDT 2009

Reinier Zwitserloot wrote:

To summarize: A bitmask might marginally be more readable in rare cases, especially to the casual programmer who doesn't have much experience with bit-level trickery, which is small comfort, because bitmasking comes up very rarely in java code in the first place. In most other situations, binary literals are much worse compared to hex literals.

In many cases bit masks would be more reliably written as expressions. So if we add methods to Integer (and Byte, Long):

static int bit(int index); static int bits(int fromIndex, int toIndex);

Then we could write Integer.bits(3, 7). Switch statements require constant expressions, so for this to be completely convenient it would be necessary to extend what was allowed in a constant expression to include the standard bit manipulation methods.

Mark Thornton

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