Division by two

In mathematics, division by two or halving has also been called mediation or dimidiation. The treatment of this as a different operation from multiplication and division by other numbers goes back to the ancient Egyptians, whose multiplication algorithm used division by two as one of its fundamental steps. Some mathematicians as late as the sixteenth century continued to view halving as a separate operation, and it often continues to be treated separately in modern computer programming. Performing this operation is simple in decimal arithmetic, in the binary numeral system used in computer programming, and in other even-numbered bases.

In binary arithmetic, division by two can be performed by a bit shift operation that shifts the number one place to the right. This is a form of strength reduction optimization. For example, 1101001 in binary (the decimal number 105), shifted one place to the right, is 110100 (the decimal number 52): the lowest order bit, a 1, is removed. Similarly, division by any power of two 2^k may be performed by right-shifting k positions. Because bit shifts are often much faster operations than division, replacing a division by a shift in this way can be a helpful step in program optimization. However, for the sake of software portability and readability, it is often best to write programs using the division operation and trust in the compiler to perform this replacement. An example from Common Lisp:

The above statements, however, are not always true when dealing with dividing signed binary numbers. Shifting right by 1 bit will divide by two, always rounding down. However, in some languages, division of signed binary numbers round towards 0 (which, if the result is negative, means it rounds up). For example, Java is one such language: in Java, -3 / 2 evaluates to -1, whereas -3 >> 1 evaluates to -2. So in this case, the compiler cannot optimize division by two by replacing it by a bit shift, when the dividend could possibly be negative.

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