[Tutor] I don't quite understand bitwise

[nathan tech]

Hello

Just wanted to give a quick thanks for everyone's responses.

I will be reviewing your answers in the next few days and will ask more 
if I need :)

Nathan

On 16/12/2020 00:08, Alan Gauld via Tutor wrote:
> On 15/12/2020 19:11, nathan tech wrote:
>
>> So I started to research how the x|y format works and came across
>> bitwise operators which is apparrently what is meant when x|y|z is used.
> You can find a discription of nitwide operators and their use in
> programming in the Functional Programming topic in my tutorial.
>
> However long story short is:
>
> if you do A|B
>
> then any bit that is 1 in either A or B will be 1 in the output.
>
> if you do A&B
>
> then any bit that is 0 in either A or B will be 0 in the output.
>
> Thus A|B combines the 1s in both entities - this is usually
> what you want when the entities represent sets of options
> such as application options and user defined options.
>
> So if you want the total number of options set you can do
>
> options_var = user|application
> # now use the combined options_var
>
> And A&B can be used to select a subset of options by making B
> a "mask" - that is a known bit pattern.
>
> Thus if you want to know if bits 2 and 4 of A are set to 1 do this:
>
> B = 0b1010
> res = A&B
> if res == B: print("Both options are set")
> else: print("One, or both, options are not set")
>
> Finally, | can be used to accumulate results over several
> operations. You used to see this before try/except
> style error handling became common:
>
> errors = 0
> errors |= operation1(myObject)
> errors |= operation2(myObject)
> errors |= operation3(myObject)
> errors |= operation4(myObject)
> if errors:
>     # something went wrong, deal with it!
> else:
>     #  All OK so now use myObject
>
> A |= B is f course the same as
> A = A|B
>
> And if all operations return zero on success then any
> other result will have some 1s in it, and these will
> be transferred to errors.
>
> For bonus points the last place you might see bitwise
> operations is in cryptography.
> There the exclusive OR operator is used to encode data
> in such a way that it can be recovered later by applying
> the same mask
>
> #At transmitter
> key = 42
> data = "some string here"
> cipher = ''.join(ch^key for ch in data)
> print (cipher) # garbage...
>
> # transmit cipher...
>
> # at receiver:
> key = 42   # same as transmitter
> message = receiveData()
> plain_text = ''.join(ch|key for ch in message)
> print(plain_text)  # prints "some string here"
>
> Of course that easy to crack but many real world cipher
> systems are based on layers of algorithms on top of
> a similar basic concept.
>
> To conclude, the reason all this works is because of
> the definitions of the operations as described by
> their truth tables:
>
> A	B	A|B	A&B	A^B
> 0	0	0	0	0
> 0	1	1	0	1
> 1	0	1	0	1
> 1	1	1	1	0
>
> So
> A|B is 1 when any of A or B is 1
> A&B is only 1 if both  A and B are 1
> A^B(exclusive or) is 1 if A and B are different.
>
>
> Try them in the >>> prompt, see if you can predict the results before
> hitting return:
>
>>>> A = 0b1010
>>>> B = 0b1100
>>>> bin(A|B)
> ????
>>>> bin(A&B)
> ????
>>>> bin(A^B)
> ????
>