How can I perform multiplication without the '*' operator?

Question

I was just going through some basic stuff as I am learning C. I came upon a question to multiply a number by 7 without using the * operator. Basically it\'s like this

<

Answer 1

One evening, I found that I was extremely bored, and cooked this up:

#include 

typedef unsigned int uint32;

uint32 add(uint32 a, uint32 b) {
    do {
        uint32 s = a ^ b;
        uint32 c = a & b;
        a = s;
        b = c << 1;
    } while (a & b)
    return (a | b)
}

uint32 mul(uint32 a, uint32 b) {
    uint32 total = 0;
    do {
        uint32 s1 = a & (-(b & 1))
        b >>= 1; a <<= 1;
        total = add(s1, total)
    } while (b)
    return total;
}

int main(void) {
    using namespace std;
    uint32 a, b;

    cout << "Enter two numbers to be multiplied: ";
    cin >> a >> b;

    cout << "Total: " << mul(a,b) << endl;
    return 0;
}

The code above should be quite self-explanatory, as I tried to keep it as simple as possible. It should work, more or less, the way a CPU might perform these operations. The only bug I'm aware of is that a is not permitted to be greater than 32,767 and b is not permitted to be large enough to overflow a (that is, multiply overflow is not handled, so 64-bit results are not possible). It should even work with negative numbers, provided the inputs are appropriately reinterpret_cast<>.