Objective-C Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide

38 Bitwise Operations

In the first part of this book, we described the memory of a computer as a vast meadow of switches (billions of switches) that could be turned on or off. Each switch represents one bit, and we usually use 1 to mean “on” and 0 to mean “off.”

However, you never address a single bit. Instead, you deal with byte-sized chunks of bits. If you think of a byte as an unsigned 8-bit integer, each bit represents another power of two:

Figure 38.1  One byte representing the decimal number 60

As a side-effect of evolving to have 10 fingers, people like to work with decimal numbers (base-10). Computers, as ...