Bitwise operations equivalent of greater than operator

Question

I am working on a function that will essentially see which of two ints is larger. The parameters that are passed are 2 32-bit ints. The trick is the only operat

Answer 1

EDIT:

Okay, there were some issues with the code, but I revised it and the following works.

This auxiliary function compares the numbers' n'th significant digit:

int compare ( int a, int b, int n )
{
    int digit = (0x1 << n-1);
    if ( (a & digit) && (b & digit) )
       return 0; //the digit is the same

    if ( (a & digit) && !(b & digit) )
       return 1; //a is greater than b

    if ( !(a & digit) && (b & digit) )
       return -1; //b is greater than a
}

The following should recursively return the larger number:

int larger ( int a, int b )
{
    for ( int i = 8*sizeof(a) - 1 ; i >= 0 ; i-- )
    {
       if ( int k = compare ( a, b, i ) )
       {
           return (k == 1) ? a : b;
       }
    }
    return 0; //equal
}