Bitwise Shifting
Bitwise shifting can be useful in AS3 as it can give some quite significant performance gains. It isn’t actually as complicated as you think and the name explains exactly what’s going on.
If we take the number 7 represented as 111 in binary and we move that value right and so removing the last 1 we get 11 which is binary for 3. Results are always floored because we are dealing in binary and so whole numbers.
Here are a few examples of it can be used:
Divide by 2 and floor
num >> 1
Multiply by 2 and floor
num << 1
Split up 24bit RGB Colour
var colour:uint = 0x336699; var red:uint = color >> 16; var green:uint = color >> 8 & 0xFF; var blue:uint = color & 0xFF;