We can imagine a situation in which we need to work with a function taht has some boolean arguments:
int f(int x, bool add, bool square, bool multiply)These function arguments in large software increase and it is not long term mantainable. Every time we need to add an option, we must modify the function definition.
It is possible to simplify a lot this mechanism with bit flags.
All we need is a typedef and some defines:
typedef unsigned int t_flag;
#define FLAG_A (1 << 0)
#define FLAG_B (1 << 1)
#define FLAG_C (1 << 2)This way we defined a new type t_flag useful to represent the data type which should contains a value, for example, to compare to defined flags.
int f(int x, t_flag flag)With bitwise operators we can extract information from flag.