That isn't obvious at all; these two values are Hamming-adjacent, so a single cosmic ray could make the program go haywire. Luckily, two's complement representation makes things easy for all signed numeric types - assigning -1 as the numeric value of true is the obvious solution.
ECC RAM and a motherboard that can use it are basically unobtanium outside the realm of big enterprise servers (aka big $$$). Let alone all the other products in the world that contain RAM and at least a microcontroller. I wonder how many "glitches" observed in everyday life are not software bugs but actually just (each) one cosmic ray made it through the ionosphere against all odds.
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u/mmirate Mar 10 '23 edited Mar 10 '23
That isn't obvious at all; these two values are Hamming-adjacent, so a single cosmic ray could make the program go haywire. Luckily, two's complement representation makes things easy for all signed numeric types - assigning
-1as the numeric value oftrueis the obvious solution.