How does condition statement work with bit-wise operators? - c++

Question

I tried to understand how if condition work with bitwise operators.
A way to check if a number is even or odd can be done by:
#include <iostream>
#include <string>
using namespace std;
string test()
{
int i = 8; //a number
if(i & 1)
return "odd";
else
return "even";
}
int main ()
{
cout << test();
return 0;
}
The Part I don't understand is how the if condition work. In this case if i = 8 then the in If statement it is doing 1000 & 1 which should gives back 1000 which equal 8.
If i = 7, then in if statement it should be doing 111 & 1 which gives back 111 which equal 7
Why is it the case that if(8) will return "even" and if(7) return "odd"? I guess I want to understand what the if statement is checking to be True and what to be False when dealing with bit-wise operators.
Just A thought when I wrote this question down is it because it's actually doing
for 8: 1000 & 0001 which gives 0
for 7: 0111 & 0001 which gives 1?

Answer 1

Yes, you are right in the last part. Binary & and | are performed bit by bit. Since
1 & 1 == 1
1 & 0 == 0
0 & 1 == 0
0 & 0 == 0
we can see that:
8 & 1 == 1000 & 0001 == 0000
and
7 & 1 == 0111 & 0001 == 0001
Your test function does correctly compute whether a number is even or odd though, because a & 1 tests whether there is a 1 in the 1s place, which there only is for odd numbers.

Answer 2

Actually, in C, C++ and other major programming languages the & operator do AND operations in each bit for integral types. The nth bit in a bitwise AND is equal to 1 if and only if the nth bit of both operands are equal to 1.
For example:
8 & 1 =
1000 - 8
0001 - 1
----
0000 - 0
7 & 1 =
0111 - 7
0001 - 1
----
0001 - 1
7 & 5 =
0111 - 7
0101 - 5
----
0101 - 5
For this reason doing a bitwise AND between an even number and 1 will always be equal 0 because only odd numbers have their least significant bit equal to 1.

Answer 3

if(x) in C++ converts x to boolean. An integer is considered true iff it is nonzero.
Thus, all if(i & 1) is doing is checking to see if the least-significant bit is set in i. If it is set, i&1 will be nonzero; if it is not set, i&1 will be zero.
The least significant bit is set in an integer iff that integer is odd, so thus i&1 is nonzero iff i is odd.

Answer 4

What you say the code is doing is actually how bit-wise operators are supposed to work. In your example of (8 & 1):
1000 & 0001 = 0000
because in the first value, the last bit is set to 0, while in the second value, the last bit is set to 1. 0 & 1 = 0.
0111 & 0001 = 0001
In both values, the last bit is set to 1, so the result is 1 since 1 & 1 = 1.

Answer 5

The expression i & 1, where i is an int, has type int. Its value is 1 or 0, depending on the value of the low bit of i. In the statement if(i & 1), the result of that expression is converted to bool, following the usual rule for integer types: 0 becomes false and non-zero becomes true.