Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
For example, 32 contiguous bits may be treated as an array of 32 Booleans, a 4-byte string, an unsigned 32-bit integer or an IEEE single precision floating point value. Because the stored bits are never changed, the programmer must know low level details such as representation format, byte order, and alignment needs, to meaningfully cast.
In addition to the assumption about bit-representation of floating-point numbers, the above floating-point type-punning example also violates the C language's constraints on how objects are accessed: [3] the declared type of x is float but it is read through an expression of type unsigned int.
Integer are reference objects, on the surface no different from List, Object, and so forth. To convert from an int to an Integer, one had to "manually" instantiate the Integer object. As of J2SE 5.0, the compiler will accept the last line, and automatically transform it so that an Integer object is created to store the value 9. [2]
In class-based programming, downcasting, or type refinement, is the act of casting a base or parent class reference, to a more restricted derived class reference. [1] This is only allowable if the object is already an instance of the derived class, and so this conversion is inherently fallible.
Python supports most object oriented programming (OOP) techniques. It allows polymorphism, not only within a class hierarchy but also by duck typing. Any object can be used for any type, and it will work so long as it has the proper methods and attributes. And everything in Python is an object, including classes, functions, numbers and modules.
For example, adding 1 to a pointer to 4-byte integer values will increment the pointer's pointed-to byte-address by 4. This has the effect of incrementing the pointer to point at the next element in a contiguous array of integers—which is often the intended result.
A short (two bytes) will be 2-byte aligned. An int (four bytes) will be 4-byte aligned. A long (four bytes) will be 4-byte aligned. A float (four bytes) will be 4-byte aligned. A double (eight bytes) will be 8-byte aligned on Windows and 4-byte aligned on Linux (8-byte with -malign-double compile time option).
In the example code below, data item VERS-NUM is defined as a 2-byte binary integer containing a version number. A second data item VERS-BYTES is defined as a two-character alphanumeric variable. Since the second item is redefined over the first item, the two items share the same address in memory, and therefore share the same underlying data ...