Thoughts of Dan

My good friend  Greg  mentioned that I should use bitwise operators to perform a toggle, as opposed to my  earlier method of using integer math to manipulate the state .  I had not done that because the bitwise implementation is imho not comprehensible by a developer who does not have a CS degree. As an example it is not at ALL clear to most people that  ~2<<10 != ~(2<<10) Although I suppose that's the point of a method name. /** * A simple way to implement a toggle switch using an integer to store the state * and bitwise operators to manipulate the toggle * * @author Dan Fishman http://www.fishdan.com * * This code released to the public under the CreativeCommons 3.0 license by * the author on 8/21/2011 * * http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ */ public class TestToggle { public static int toggleState=0; public static void main(String argv[]){ for ( int x=0;x<32;x++){ ...

We were talking about a way to use an integer to indicate teh state of a series of switches.  e.g. if there were 5 switches and the first 3 were on we would say think of that as 11100, or 28 Not a bad method -- you can very quickly toggle switches on and off by calling toggle(boolean on,int position) and you can quickly check it the toggle at a position is on by calling toggleIsOn(int position); The code snippet is below, comments welcome.  you have to declare toggleState yourself of course...; public int toggleState=0; /** * if onOff==true we set the value at pos == 1 aka on * else we set it to 0; * @param onOff * @param pos */ public void toggle(boolean onOff, int pos){ if (toggleState== null ){ toggleState=0; } if (onOff== true ){ if (toggleIsOn(pos)){ //do nothing, already on } else { //we wa...