Would you have recognised the opportunity to use it, not knowing how it works? Sometimes when we learn a new technique we suddenly see all the places it can be

Would you have recognised the opportunity to use it, not knowing how it works? Sometimes when we learn a new technique we suddenly see all the places it can be used that we didn't know about before. There's the old (probably apocryphal) story about the landscaper who was able to fire one of his staff when a customer told him he can calculate the side of a right-angled triangle without measuring all 3 sides. What he did worked for him, he just didn't know there was a better way. Anyway I do agree in this case you are probably correct. I think most programmers these days use bitwise logical operators for flags and rarely if ever bit shift outside of system code.