I revisited some old code and noticed there was a BSR using piece of assembler there that used bsr as a cheap 2log for some buffer dimensioning.

When I tried to replace it with the intrinsic bsrdword, hoping making it both inlinable and more portablw I noted that the intrinsic was exactly the same as my code but returned 255 instead of -1 for "0".

Since this is a higher number than other values, it required another test to avoid outrageous large buffers, resulting in asm code (-O4):

bsrl %eax,%eax
jne .Lj7
movl $255,%eax
.Lj7:
# Var $result located in register eax
# [6] if result=255 then result:=-1;
cmpl $255,%eax
jne .Lj9
movl $-1,%eax
.Lj9:

and then leal 2(%eax),%ebx to add two. Pretty hideous.

If the dword version returned $FFFFFFFF it could be at least typecasted to -1.

So the questions are:
1. why do the primitives deliver a signed result ?
2. why do they not all deliver -1 for their with ($FFFF for 2-byte etc).
3. (for Michael: :-) why doesn't the documentation doesn't mention the behaviour for no bits set?).

Since (3) the behaviour is not documented, we can still fix this ? :-)

The current choices (0..31 and 255) seem pointless.

Marco van de Voort wrote

If the dword version returned $FFFFFFFF it could be at least typecasted to -1.

You can typecast the result to shortint to get -1 in that case.

So the questions are: 1. why do the primitives deliver a signed result ?

*unsigned

2. why do they not all deliver -1 for their with ($FFFF for 2-byte etc).

Probably because that is how the originally submitted generic implementation behaved: http://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=17592

3. (for Michael: :-) why doesn't the documentation doesn't mention the behaviour for no bits set?). Since (3) the behaviour is not documented, we can still fix this ? :-)

They've behaved like this since FPC 2.6.0, so no.

Jonas

In our previous episode, Jonas Maebe said:

> If the dword version returned $FFFFFFFF it could be at least typecasted to > -1. You can typecast the result to shortint to get -1 in that case.

That removes the additional branch, reducing it to a movsbl, so I assume the resulting code is better, thanks.

> So the questions are: > 1. why do the primitives deliver a signed result ? *unsigned

True, but question still stands. Anyway, I'll wait if FLorian recollects anything.

Looking at the generic (non cpu) version with the lookup table, the reason for $ff becomes somewhat logical. It is bytewise, and $FF is the value of 0 in the per byte table.

Anyway, I just wanted to avoid floating point in the original case, and it was not really extremely speeddependent. I just wondered.

I've filed a doc bug 30740 so that at least something good comes out of it.

I guess the reason was that no more than one byte is needed for the result of bs*. But I agree, the decision was not very well thought.