Swapping two Numbers without Temporary Variables

Ever wondered how to swap two numbers without using a temporary variable?

I just found this very old note that I thought is worth sharing. The trick is quite old and you might already know about this, but when I started out with programming, it blew my mind.

In school, we get taught to use a temporary variable to swap two numbers:

let a = 5
let b = 10

let temp = a;

a = b    // a = 10
b = temp // b = 5

But by using some arithmetic, we can save us a few bytes of memory:

let a = 5
let b = 10

a = a + b // a = 15 ; b = 10
b = a - b // a = 15 ; b = 5
a = a - b // a = 10 ; b = 5 

Please never use this in any production code. The less we have to think about a piece of code, the better it is. It's a fun thought experiment nevertheless!

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This is post 026 of #100DaysToOffload.

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