Oldest trick in the programming

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Before half-century, each bit inside of the computer was important. One of the most frequently used function was "swap".

Swap do the simple thing and you can say well I know. But in that time each operation and memory usage was important. So to have an efficient swap between 2 variables and not using third variables.

So trick goes like this:

A = A + B
B = A - B
A = A - B

Instead of:

TMP = A
A = B
B = TMP

Python code (tnx to Jovan Sh):

>>> a = 5
>>> b = 3
>>> (a, b) = (b, a)
>>> print a,b
3 5

With this approach at that time, programmers save a lot of memory usage.

Also, you can find all these tricks in the book Hacker's Delight