From owner-help-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu  Sat Aug 10 05:31:07 1996
Subject: Re: bit operations -- are they possible?
From: Ted dot Harding at nessie dot mcc dot ac dot uk (Ted Harding)
To: berntn at sto dot foa dot se
Cc: help-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu
Date: Sat, 10 Aug 1996 11:15:55 +0100 (GMT+0100)

( Re Message From: Bernt Nilsson )
> 
> I have an older FORTRAN program for demultiplexing sampled data files. 
> In these multiplexed files, consisting of 16 bit words, each word 
> contains a 12 bit value and a 4 bit channel number.
> 
> The problem with the FORTRAN program is that it cannot handle files 
> larger than 32 MB. therefore I would like to let Octave handle the 
> demultiplexing instead.
> 
> Is it possible to use Octave for "sifting" out the value and the 
> channel number respectively, or do I have to use C/FORTRAN for this? 
> That is, is it possible to rewrite my old program as an Octave m-file?
> 
> Since I wrote this message I have found out that I could use the 
> string routines bin2dec and dec2bin. The question is then, would an 
> m-file using these routines be painfully slow? Is there anyone with 
> experience in doing these operations?

Whether or not it is possible, let alone reasonably fast (which it
probably wouldn't be), under octave, I would go for C in this case.
A C program to do this job would be very short, and very fast, and
would not have a problem with file size.

Ted.                                    (Ted dot Harding at nessie dot mcc dot ac dot uk)