Bit Level Manipulation

Serious question: How many people here on HN find things at this level useful? I'm always intrigued to find out how many working programmers don't know this sort of thing.<p>I might start a poll on it ...

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,<p>"result = bits[3] xor bits2[3]".

It's never bad to post something that might seem very trivial at first. I learnt the trick of checking an odd or even with this post. Thanks OP!