Yes, of course, I agree. If execution time is really critical, then I can easily believe that pack is faster, I have observed that myself quite a few times. But if execution time is not so crucial, then I would say that the time you spend writing relatively complicated subroutines using pack and unpack might not be worth the effort. An hour of a developer's working time is worth many many many CPU cycles. But this is of course your decision, based on your knowledge of the process.

Writing the examples above using printf took me probably about 5 to 6 minutes, perhaps even less, I know that using pack will probably take me hours, because the syntax is quite complicated (or perhaps because I don't master it well enough, but that does not really change the net result). Being an independent consultant, I know what my time is worth, and I know that I will go for the smaller developer's time consuming option, except if high performance is really badly needed.

Oh, and BTW,the solution I offered seems to work also with negative integers.

In reply to Re^3: How to convert between decimal and binary for negative numbers? by Laurent_R
in thread How to convert between decimal and binary for positive/negative numbers? by thanos1983

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