Question

Hey, I’m self-learning about bitwise, and I saw somewhere in the internet that arithmetic shift (>>) by one halfs a number. I wanted to test it:

44 >> 1 returns 22, ok
22 >> 1 returns 11, ok
11 >> 1 returns 5, and not 5.5, why?

Another Example:

255 >> 1 returns 127
127 >> 1 returns 63 and not 63.5, why?

Thanks.

Answer 1

The bit shift operator doesn’t actually divide by 2. Instead, it moves the bits of the number to the right by the number of positions given on the right hand side. For example:

00101100 = 44
00010110 = 44 >> 1 = 22

Notice how the bits in the second line are the same as the line above, merely
shifted one place to the right. Now look at the second example:

00001011 = 11
00000101 = 11 >> 1 = 5

This is exactly the same operation as before. However, the result of 5 is due to the fact that the last bit is shifted to the right and disappears, creating the result 5. Because of this behavior, the right-shift operator will generally be equivalent to dividing by two and then throwing away any remainder or decimal portion.