Ol' Rube came to mind many time while I wrote that missive
. No, I don't expect anyone to implement the above, my point was that it wasn't impossible to do. I also wanted to tie it in with the mechanism by which some analog to digital converters do their thing.
Actually, the binary search that I described is faster (in general) than the algorithm that you've described. It only needs one time through the loop to resolve each bit. The other method requires, assuming an equal distribution of data, an average (2^n)/2 or 2^(n-1) times through the loop where n is the number of bits to resolve.
-Kevin