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swap values without temporary variable (See related posts)

The XOR swap algorithm is an inefficient method of swapping two variables. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xor_swap_algorithm

void XORSwap(void *x, void *y)
{
   *x ^= *y;
   *y ^= *x;
   *x ^= *y;
}
to c swap algorithm values by nevadalife on Sat Sep 23 13:40:36 -0400 2006

Comments on this post

bugsmasher posts on Jan 09, 2007 at 21:36
You might mention that the code snippet doesn't actually work (you can't XOR two pointers, even void pointers), but it illustrates the technique.

It is not necessarily inefficient. On Intel under GCC, the compiler actually knows about this trick and produces a single XCHG instruction if possible! Very cool. Anyway, I like this trick.

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