This is really neat, thanks for the thorough explanation. I have banned myself from using printfs to figure out things like this. Instead I would use a debugge

This is really neat, thanks for the thorough explanation. I have banned myself from using printfs to figure out things like this. Instead I would use a debugger and breakpoints to view the live variables in their different data formats. In GDB, that's p/t for binary and p/d for decimal.