C Primer Plus®, Third Edition

Chapter Summary

Computing hardware is closely tied to the binary number system because the 1s and 0s of binary numbers can be used to represent the on and off states of bits in computer memory and registers. Although C does not allow you to write numbers in binary form, it does recognize the related octal and hexadecimal notations. Just as each binary digit represents 1 bit, each octal digit represents 3 bits, and each hexadecimal digit represents 4 bits. This relationship makes it relatively simple to convert binary numbers to octal or hexadecimal form.

C features several bitwise operators, so called because they operate independently on each bit within a value. The bitwise negation operator (~) inverts each bit in its operand, converting 1s ...