Bit counting

Why bother when you can simply do an eight line function?

int bitcount(char b) { register int retval=0;

if (a & 1) retval++; if (a & 2) retval++; if (a & 4) retval++; if (a & 8) retval++; if (a & 16) retval++; if (a & 32) retval++; if (a & 64) retval++; if (a & 128) retval++;

return retval; }

[...] Because on a lot of architectures this implementation may be hideously inefficient. All the world is not an Intel chip, thank god. Ian.