The & operator provides a mask that “cancels out” bits in the first depending if they’re set in the second parameter - so assume N is the number 17, that expressed in binary is 00010001, the number 1 in binary is 00000001, so masking the two together will “blank” the first set of bits, leaving you with N as 00000001.
Can you please explain why & operator performs masking?
@rjra2611 the bit wise and of 0 and 1 is 0. so if you want to know the first 4 bits of a number only then you can put 1 on the first 4 bit and then 0 on the rest and if you do bitwise & now the first 4 digits would be the original digit and rest will be zero and in a way we have formed a mask over them.
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