Question

link

Add two numbers (integers) without using + or plus arithmetic operator.

Solution

Bit operations.

We could not do this in 1 pass, because multiple rounding issues.

So we do it in while-loop then! 2 solutions available: iteratively and recursively.

Code

written by me

public int add(int x, int y) {
    // add y into x (and y results to 0)
    while (y != 0) {
        int carry = x & y;
        int sum = x ^ y;
        x = sum;
        y = carry << 1;
    }
    return x;
}

recursive

public int add2(int x, int y) {
    if (y == 0) {
        return x;
    }
    int carry = (x & y) << 1;
    return add2(x ^ y, carry);
}

updated on Sep 10th, 2014: this question appears on cc150v4 20.1. I wrote the following code: 

public static int add_no_arithm(int a, int b) {
    if (b == 0)
        return a;
    int addition = a ^ b;
    int carry = (a & b) << 1;
    return add_no_arithm(addition, carry);
}