11.2. 11.2 What Is Bit Data, Anyway?
Before describing how to manipulate bits, it might not be a bad idea to define exactly what this text means by bit data. Most readers probably assume that bit manipulation programs twiddle individual bits in memory. While programs that do this are definitely bit manipulation programs, we're not going to limit our definition to just those programs. For our purposes, "bit manipulation" refers to working with data types that consist of strings of bits that are noncontiguous or are not an even multiple of 8 bits long. Generally, such bit objects will not represent numeric integers, although we will not place this restriction on our bit strings.
A bit string is some contiguous sequence of one or more bits (this term ...
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