Question

Why does this return 10010 instead of 00001?

0110 >> 2 // 10010

I thought the bits would be shifted to the right 2 times, but they’re not. The output I expected was 0001 or 1 but I got 0 instead. Why is this?

Answer 1

0110 is an octal constant because it starts with a zero:

>>> 0110
72
>>> 0110 >> 2
18
>>> bin(_)
'0b10010'

This is Python, but the same is true of many other languages with octal constants (Java, C, JavaScript, …). Not all languages provide binary constants. If you don’t have them, you can use hexadecimal constants instead (0b0110 is 0x6, for example).