Your code is nowhere near as egregious as the OP's. Actually, I would even suspect your code is made better by not using hacks, because you deal with bases (rad

Your code is nowhere near as egregious as the OP's. Actually, I would even suspect your code is made better by not using hacks, because you deal with bases (radix) that are not necessarily 2. And using strings is a necessity since your output is a string. The original article, instead, is a straightforward bit extraction, from integer to integer. For people who do know bitwise operators, the simple shift reduces mental load (at least according to OP, and I strongly agree).