I'm following a college course about operating systems and we're learning how to convert from binary to hexadecimal, decimal to hexadecimal, etc. and today we just learned how signed/unsigned numbers are stored in memory using the two's complement (~number + 1).
We have a couple of exercises to do on paper and I would like to be able to verify my answers before submitting my work to the teacher. I wrote a C++ program for the first few exercises but now I'm stuck as to how I could verify my answer with the following problem:
char a, b;
short c;
a = -58;
c = -315;
b = a >> 3;
and we need to show the binary representation in memory of a, b and c.
I've done it on paper and it gives me the following results (all the binary representations in memory of the numbers after the two's complement):
a = 00111010 (it's a char, so 1 byte)
b = 00001000 (it's a char, so 1 byte)
c = 11111110 11000101 (it's a short, so 2 bytes)
Is there a way to verify my answer? Is there a standard way in C++ to show the binary representation in memory of a number, or do I have to code each step myself (calculate the two's complement and then convert to binary)? I know the latter wouldn't take so long but I'm curious as to if there is a standard way to do so.
The easiest way is probably to create an std::bitset representing the value, then stream that to cout.
#include <bitset>
...
char a = -58;
std::bitset<8> x(a);
std::cout << x << '\n';
short c = -315;
std::bitset<16> y(c);
std::cout << y << '\n';