In the industrial automation world and most of the IT industry, data is aligned to the nearest word. Depending on architecture, that’s usually either 16, 32, or 64 bits. And that’s the space a single Boolean takes.
I set all 8 bits to 1 because I want it to be really true.
01111111 = true
11111111 = negative true = false
00001111 = maybe
10101010 = I don’t know
00000001 00000000 00001111 10101010
I was programming in assembly for ARM (some cortex chip) and I kid you not the C program we were integrating with required 255, with just 1 it read it as false
You jest, but on some older computers, all ones was the official truth value. Other values may also have been true in certain contexts, but that was the guaranteed one.
Then you need to ask yourself: Performance or memory efficiency? Is it worth the extra cycles and instructions to put 8 bools in one byte and & 0x bitmask the relevant one?
A lot of times using less memory is actually better for performance because the main bottleneck is memory bandwidth or latency.
Depending on the language
typedef struct { bool a: 1; bool b: 1; bool c: 1; bool d: 1; bool e: 1; bool f: 1; bool g: 1; bool h: 1; } __attribute__((__packed__)) not_if_you_have_enough_booleans_t;string boolEnable = "True";Back in the day when it mattered, we did it like
#define BV00 (1 << 0) #define BV01 (1 << 1) #define BV02 (1 << 2) #define BV03 (1 << 3) ...etc #define IS_SET(flag, bit) ((flag) & (bit)) #define SET_BIT(var, bit) ((var) |= (bit)) #define REMOVE_BIT(var, bit) ((var) &= ~(bit)) #define TOGGLE_BIT(var, bit) ((var) ^= (bit)) ....then... #define MY_FIRST_BOOLEAN BV00 SET_BIT(myFlags, MY_FIRST_BOOLEAN)With embedded stuff its still done like that. And if you go from the arduino functionss to writing the registers directly its a hell of a lot faster.
just like electronic components, they sell the gates by the chip with multiple gates in them because it’s cheaper
if wasting a byte or seven matters to you, then then you need to be working in a lower level language.
It’s 7 bits…
Pay attention. 🤪
7 bytes! Look at Mr. Moneybags here!
I have a solution with a bit fields. Now your bool is 1 byte :
struct Flags { bool flag0 : 1; bool flag1 : 1; bool flag2 : 1; bool flag3 : 1; bool flag4 : 1; bool flag5 : 1; bool flag6 : 1; bool flag7 : 1; };Or for example:
struct Flags { bool flag0 : 1; bool flag1 : 1: int x_cord : 3; int y_cord : 3; };Redundancy is nice in the event of bitflip errors