There's a lot of discussion about "should most devs be expected to know this off the top of their head these days?" that I think misses the point entirely. A m

There's a lot of discussion about "should most devs be expected to know this off the top of their head these days?" that I think misses the point entirely. A much more relevant question is: when you are working on code that eventually needs a "give me the first 42 bits of a 64-bit value" function, do you: (a) do some basic research into binary operators since you're at least aware that binary operations are a thing, or (b) just whip up the first loop implementation that comes to mind? If you're verifying your code anyway - which I sure hope you are when writing a delightful loop like the one in the linked article - it won't take you long to check out what the bitwise operators do.