title: bitwise indexing in C?
body: <p>I'm trying to implement a data compression idea I've had, and since I'm imagining running it against a large corpus of test data, I had thought to code it in C (I mostly have experience in scripting languages like Ruby and Tcl.) </p>
  
  <p>Looking through the O'Reilly 'cow' books on C, I realize that I can't simply index the bits of a simple 'char' or 'int' type variable as I'd like to to do bitwise comparisons and operators.  </p>
  
  <p>Am I correct in this perception?   Is it reasonable for me to use an enumerated type for representing a bit (and make an array of these, and writing functions to convert to and from char)?  If so, is such a type and functions defined in a standard library already somewhere?  Are there other (better?) approaches?   Is there some example code somewhere that someone could point me to?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks - </p>