Here's a Python gotcha that I spent some time tracking down. I'm writing it up in the spirit of saving developers a debugging headache in the future.
I had an integer with a single bit set, and I wanted to find the index of that bit. For example, 4 in binary is 00000100. The 1 is at the third position from the right, which should give an index of 2 – since the first position is 0.
You can do this in two ways; either check each bit in turn until you find a 1, or you can use math as a shortcut. I chose the math solution:
Simple right? Finally staying awake in high school maths paid off. So simple that it was the last bit of code I suspected to be broken (spoiler: it was). continue reading…