the wiki is a visual representation. The representation is 0s and 1s.
The use case for bitwise operations is to control the value of 1 bit.
Consider if you have a 0000 1000 value. It's mapped to hardware output so the 4th LED is on. Now you want to turn the 5th on, and the 4th off. You would use a left shift so the output becomes 0001 0000.
That's all there is to it. Bitwise operators operate on bits, not bytes. Because computers operate on bytes, and you can't address a bit - you have to modify bytes to accomplish your goal.
> Bitwise operators operate on bits, not bytes. Because computers operate on bytes, and you can't address a bit - you have to modify bytes to accomplish your goal.
I think this may be the fundamental intent I was missing. How do people wrangle these things in their head! Is it ever intuitive, or are even the proficient externally visualising this stuff in some way?
The use case for bitwise operations is to control the value of 1 bit.
Consider if you have a 0000 1000 value. It's mapped to hardware output so the 4th LED is on. Now you want to turn the 5th on, and the 4th off. You would use a left shift so the output becomes 0001 0000.
That's all there is to it. Bitwise operators operate on bits, not bytes. Because computers operate on bytes, and you can't address a bit - you have to modify bytes to accomplish your goal.