When you buy through affiliate links in our content, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Learn What Does Arithmetic Shift Mean?
An arithmetic shift in computer science involves a bitwise operation shifting binary numbers to an adjacent position, or some other position, either right or left. Arithmetic shifts can help perform multiplication or division on binary numbers.
Techopedia Explains Arithmetic Shift
As computers entered the “personal computer age” and evolved, arithmetic shifts became a way to work with binary, and indirectly, with machine language. Shifting the bits changes the values of the binary numbers, which can relate to memory addresses or other aspects of programming and input.
Arithmetic shifts can be used with signed or unsigned numbers. Experts call some types of arithmetic shifts logical shifts right or left. More can be found in a wealth of specific coding examples online showing, for example, how a function to perform an arithmetic shift changes the value of a binary number for some specific programming purpose, and what these shifts look like in the syntax of particular programming languages.
