Along the lines of AnIdiotOnTheNet's points, I'm surprised simple curiosity never led to browsing the bitwise operators - they're core features of every program

Along the lines of AnIdiotOnTheNet's points, I'm surprised simple curiosity never led to browsing the bitwise operators - they're core features of every programming language (the languages themselves, not the standard libraries). Bitwise Or is used all the time for flags in higher level languages (e.g. regex flags in python). And dealing with any kind of efficient binary file format or network protocol usually requires their use. Guess these are things you could never encounter at a job, but it does worry me - modern software performance on our supercomputer phones and desktops is often atrocious, and needlessly so. Using compact binary representations has a lot of benefits - lets you do a lot more work in a single cache line (fetching from RAM is 100x slower), saves storage space (when you're dealing with a million or a billion of something) and is often easier to understand and maintain, surprisingly, than an over-abstracted class hierarchy that does everything it can to bury and hide the data your program works with.