How to swap two variables without using a third variable & pointer?
Shital Parab 0 Newbie Poster
Grunt 19 Junior Poster
Any good reason to do that?
Using temporary variable will be much better.
iamthwee
My guess is you would use the xor operator or use a trick with operator overloading += ?
Grunt 19 Junior Poster
My guess is you would use the xor operator or use a trick with operator overloading
+=?
xor trick which the link is showing has undefined behaviour and the one with += doesn't work for all cases.
~s.o.s~ 2,560 Failure as a human Team Colleague Featured Poster
If you are using it for educational purposes then there are two options mentioned above by Mr. iamthwee.
And if using for some real application and u think that doing the swap without temporary variable would reduce the space required or the time then do think again. Its not that way. Current compilers are so optimised that using a temp varible doesnt even a fractiion affect the program.
But still if u are so peculiar about performance then usign Assembly Language is the way to go.
So u have two options:
1) use normal temp variable
2) use assembly language procedures
since using XOR and += have their own shortcomings.
Salem 5,199 Posting Sage
> How to swap two variables without using a third variable & pointer?
This ceased to be interesting when we came down from the trees and started using high level programming languages.
If your "teacher" somehow thinks this is a good idea you need a better teacher.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xor_swap
Way too many special cases for it to be considered anything more than a party trick.
Another recent post on the same subject.
http://www.daniweb.com/techtalkforums/thread49488.html
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