Name: rmT116609 Date: 12/12/2003


A DESCRIPTION OF THE REQUEST :
There is a nice bit-count method in BigInteger.bitCnt(). It seems to be influenced by 'Hackers delight'. An average programmer would just code a simple loop for this. The classes (Short?), Integer, Long (maybe Math) should be extended to provide a public static method like bitCnt.


JUSTIFICATION :
Make nifty, rare known algorithms available for general use - it's already there - but package-local in BigInteger. The current implementation calls for (avoidable) cut-and-paste - if someone finds it...
(Incident Review ID: 230602)
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