Question

So, bitfields. Specifically, large bitfields. I understand how to manipulate individual values in a bitfield, but how would I go about doing this on a large set, such as say:

uint[] bitfield = new uint[4] { 0x0080000, 0x00FA3020, 0x00C8000, 0x0FF00D0 }; 

The specific problem I’m having is doing left and right shifts that carry through across the whole array. So for instance, if I did a >> 4 on the above array, I’d end up with:

uint[4] { 0x0008000, 0x000FA302, 0x000C800, 0x00FF00D }; 

Now, an (overly) simplistic algorithm here might look something like (this is me writting code on the fly):

int shift = 4; for (int i = 0; i <= shift; i++) {     for (int j = bitfield.GetUpperBound(0); j > 0; j--) {         bitfield[j] = bitfield[j] >> 1;         bitfield[j] = bitfield[j] + ((bitfield[j-1] & 1) << (sizeof(uint)*8));     }     bitfield[0] = bitfield[0] >> 1; } 

Is there anything built in that might ease working with this sort of data?

Answer 1

What makes you think that BitArray uses bools internally? It uses Boolean values to represent the bits in terms of the API, but under the hood I believe it uses an int[].