🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <55926@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> hrubin@pop.stat.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) writes:
>In article <BsFMD4.HAI@watcgl.uwaterloo.ca> awpaeth@watpix.waterloo.edu (Alan Wm Paeth) writes:
>>An elegant and efficient MSB-finding algorithm has been forwarded to me by
>>Dean Inada (dmi@peregrine.com). It has a constant running time proportional
>>to Log2(machine int size):
>
>This is a good example of 
>
>1.  Why the instruction is needed as hardware, if it is important at all;
>
Actually, on most machines there is hardware to find the most
significant bit, although it usually takes a short bit of assembler
to take advantage of it.  Convert the number to floating point and
look at the exponent bits.  The optimal seqeunce varies with the
hardware in question but it can usually be done in less than 10
instructions.