Comment by sltkr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sltkr | Hacker News Reader

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There are tons of useful features that aren't supported in C. The basic feature set of C was determined by whatever operations Dennis Ritchie could easily implement on the PDP-11 when he created the earliest C compilers. (Fun fact: the bitwise operators even preceded the Boolean operators like && and ||.)

If the question is "why isn't bit indexing supported" then "because processors didn't (and don't) support it" is the historically correct answer, whether you like it or not.

arianvanp had the point of my question correct.

Now to answer your question:

Yes some languages actually support this:

http://www.erlang.org/documentation/doc-5.6/doc/programming_...

http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/binary-strict/0.... (I have no idea why this isn't a Functor nor an Applicative Functor, so this is a bad example. and I know 'language features' in pure functional programming is cheating, butm eh)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_field -- BE WARNED. C bitfields might give you access to bits, but they're still aligned to the boundary of your system (DWORD boundary on x86 for example)

e.g.:

    struct a {
       unsigned a: 13;
       unsigned b: 12;
    };

    sizeof(struct a) => 4;

in gcc they've got a flag to force structs to their actual bit size:

   struct a {
      ...
   }__attribute__((packed));

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