Understanding Python bitwise, arithmetic, and boolean operators

Question

I\'m new to Python and not able to understand this. Can someone help break down the statement for me?

Both n and parity are integers

n += parity != n &a         


        

Answer 1

The expression is evaluated as n += (parity != (n & 1)), and the results are:

• n & 1 is a bitmask, it masks the integer n down to the least-significant bit. If n is odd, it will be 1, if it is even, that bit will be 0.

• parity != 0 or parity != 1 produces a boolean result, True or False, signalling if parity was not equal to the 0 or 1 on the right.

• The resulting True or False is added up to n, as if you did n = n + True or n = n + False. The Python boolean type is a subclass of int and False has an integer value of 0 and True a value of 1.

The code, in essence, is adding 0 or 1 to n based on the value of parity and if n is currently even or odd.

A short demo may illustrate this better.

First, n & 1 producing 0 or 1:

>>> n = 10  # even
>>> bin(n)  # the binary representation of 10
'0b1010'
>>> n & 1   # should be 0, as the last bit is 0
0
>>> n = 11  # odd
>>> bin(n)  # the binary representation of 11
'0b1011'
>>> n & 1   # should be 1, as the last bit is 1
1

Next, the parity != 0 or parity != 1 part; note that I assume parity is limited to 0 or 1, it really doesn't make sense for it to have other values:

>>> parity = 0
>>> parity != 1
True
>>> parity != 0
False
>>> parity = 1
>>> parity != 1
False
>>> parity != 0
True

Last, that booleans are integers:

>>> isinstance(True, int)
True
>>> int(True)
1
>>> 10 + True
11
>>> 10 + False
10

The formula looks like it is calculating a CRC checksum.