What is the best way to add two numbers without using the + operator?

Question

A friend and I are going back and forth with brain-teasers and I have no idea how to solve this one. My assumption is that it\'s possible with some bitwise operators, but n

Answer 1

Go based solution

func add(a int, b int) int {

for {
    carry := (a & b) << 1
    a = a ^ b
    b = carry 
    if b == 0 {
        break
    }
}

return a 

}

same solution can be implemented in Python as follows, but there is some problem about number represent in Python, Python has more than 32 bits for integers. so we will use a mask to obtain the last 32 bits.

Eg: if we don't use mask we won't get the result for numbers (-1,1)

def add(a,b):   
    mask = 0xffffffff

    while b & mask:
        carry = a & b
        a = a ^ b
        b = carry << 1

    return (a & mask)