[toolslive]

if you don't know history, you are doomed to reinvent it. The one thing you should realize is that in the past, people were not more stupid. They just had less, or different context. Regarding bit trickery, chess programming is full of it.

Curiously, it's also the area where strong static typing breaks down, as it is sometimes preferred to view the same set of bits as a value of a different type to be able to manipulate it in another way.