Bitwise operations in C Bitwise operations in C In the C programming language, operations can be performed on a bit level using bitwise operators. Bitwise operations are contrasted by byte-level operations which characterize the bitwise operators' logical counterparts, the AND, OR and NOT operators. Instead of performing on individual bits, byte-level operators perform on strings of eight bits (known as bytes) at a time. The reason for this is that a byte is normally the smallest unit of addressable memory (i.e. data with a unique memory address.) This applies to bitwise operators as well, which means that even though they operate on only one
Byte-oriented protocol bytes per code point. Byte-oriented protocol Byte-oriented framing protocol is "a communications protocol in which full bytes are used as control codes. Also known as character-oriented protocol." For example UART communication is byte-oriented. The term "character-oriented" is deprecated, since the notion of character has changed. An ASCII character fits to one byte (octet) in terms of the amount of information. With the internationalization of computer software, wide characters became necessary, to handle texts in different languages. In particular, Unicode characters (or strictly speaking code points) can be 1, 2, 3 or 4 bytes in UTF-8, and other encodings of Unicode