I have always wondered why I was taught binary as if they were arrays, but programming languages never allowed me to use bits like arrays. It's always masking a

I have always wondered why I was taught binary as if they were arrays, but programming languages never allowed me to use bits like arrays. It's always masking and shifting uint16_t or int32_t, instead of what I really want, "result = bits[3] xor bits2[3]".