Using bitset for fixed-size sequences of bits

It is not uncommon for developers to operate with bit flags; this can be either because they work with operating system APIs, usually written in C, that take various types of arguments (such as options or styles) in the form of bit flags, or because they work with libraries that do similar things, or simply because some types of problems are naturally solved with bit flags. One can think of alternatives to working with bits and bit operations, such as defining arrays having one element for every option/flag, or defining a structure with members and functions to model the bit flags, but these are often more complicated, and in case you need to pass a numerical value representing bit flags to a function you still need to convert the array or the structure to a sequence of bits. For this reason, the C++ standard provides a container called std::bitset for fixed-size sequences of bits.

Getting ready

For this recipe, you must be familiar with bitwise...