Base Conversion In PHP Using Built-In Functions

The PHP programming language has many built-in functions for converting numbers from one base to another. In fact, it has so many functions that it can be hard to know which to use. Some functions have similar capabilities, and some work with parameters of different types. We’ll sort through the differences in this article, and explain the proper context in which to use each function.

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A Simple C Program That Prints 2,098 Powers of Two

To write a computer program to print the first 1000 nonnegative powers of two, do you think you’d need to use arbitrary precision arithmetic? After all, 21000 is a 302-digit number. How about printing the first 1000 negative powers of two? 2-1000 weighs in at a whopping 1000 decimal places. It turns out all you need is standard double-precision floating-point arithmetic — and the right compiler!

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Print Precision of Floating-Point Integers Varies Too

Recently I showed that programming languages vary in how much precision they allow in printed floating-point fractions. Not only do they vary, but most don’t meet my standard — printing, to full precision, decimal values that have exact floating-point representations. Here I’ll present a similar study for floating-point integers, which had similar results.

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Print Precision of Dyadic Fractions Varies by Language

Interestingly, programming languages vary in how much precision they allow in printed floating-point fractions. You would think they’d all be the same, allowing you to print as many decimal places as you ask for. After all, a floating-point fraction is a dyadic fraction; it has as many decimal places as it has bits in its fractional representation.

Consider the dyadic fraction 5,404,319,552,844,595/253. Its decimal expansion is 0.59999999999999997779553950749686919152736663818359375, and its binary expansion is 0.10011001100110011001100110011001100110011001100110011. Both are 53 digits long. The ideal programming language lets you print all 53 decimal places, because all are meaningful. Unfortunately, many languages won’t let you do that; they typically cap the number of decimal places at between 15 and 17, which for our example might be 0.59999999999999998.

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Ten Ways to Check if an Integer Is a Power Of Two in C

To write a program to check if an integer is a power of two, you could follow two basic strategies: check the number based on its decimal value, or check it based on its binary representation. The former approach is more human-friendly but generally less efficient; the latter approach is more machine-friendly but generally more efficient. We will explore both approaches, comparing ten different but equivalent C functions.

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