In this exercise, we will work with operation on bits. When we speak about the position of a bit, index 0 corresponds to lowest order bit, 1 to the second-lowest order bit, ...
In C source code, you can write a number in binary (base 2) by prefixing it via 0b., e.g. 0b11010
= 26.
This exercise will introduce some non-standard data types which guarantee that the variable has a fixed number of bits. Indeed, on some machines, a int could use 2, 4 or 8 bytes. Hence, if we want to perform bitwise operations, we have to know first on how many bits we are working.
For this, C introduces a new class of variable types :
- int8_t (signed integer of 8 bits)
- uint8_t (unsigned integer of 8 bits)
- uint16_t (unsigned integer of 16 bits)
You can mix uint or int with bit-lengths 8, 16, 32 and 64). These types are defined in <stdint.h>