>Fred, what I mean was the practical aspects of using bitwise functions in applications. I have searched the UT files but couldn't find any info on these functions. Just wanted to know how to use them and their benefits and their limitations. Tks

Biwise functions are not used as much now as they were in the past. Bitwise functions could be used to store many yes/no type answers in a more condensed manor, 1 answer per bit. Bit math is based on binary values 0/1 or raising a 2 to a power (2^0=1, 2^1=2, 2^2=4, 2^3=8, 2^4=16, etc.)
Terminology:
Bit - a single position
Nyble - a series of 4 bits
Byte - a series of 8 bits
Word - a series of 16 bits
DoubleWord - a series of 32 bits
Hexadecimal Numbers - base 16 numbers 0 to F. Each nyble is represented by a single Hex digit (0-F), and each byte is represented by 2 Hex digits. VFP represents hex by prefixing a hex value with "0x" and can translate a decimal value to hex by TRANSFORM(Decimal,"@0")

Say you had a 32 bit integer (4 bytes) numbered 31-0

|3      2|2      1|1       |        |
|1......4|3......6|5......8|7......0|
 -------- -------- -------- --------
 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000001  = 1 decimal = 2^0
 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000010  = 2 decimal = 2^1
 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000100  = 3 decimal = 2^2
...
 10000000 00000000 00000000 00000000  = 2147483648 decimal = 2^31

Now you can manipulate individual bits by performing AND's to reset, OR's to set a bit.
Say you wanted to "set" bit 8.  You would do:
 00010000 10000000 11100000 00011000  = 276881432 decimal
                OR
 00000000 00000000 00000001 00000000  = 256 decimal
            Result
 00010000 10000000 11100001 00011000  = 276881688 decimal

An OR is a bit by bit comparison of the two values and if either bit is 1, the result is 1.  An OR is the same as adding the values together.

In VFP you could do:
nResult = BITOR(0x1080e018,0x00000100)
nResult = BITSET(0x1080e018,8)


Say you wanted to "reset" bit 8.  You would do:
 00010000 10000000 11100001 00011000  = 276881688 decimal
             AND
 11111111 11111111 11111110 11111111  = 4294967039 decimal
            Result
 00010000 10000000 11100000 00011000  = 276881432 decimal

An AND is a bit by bit comparison of the two values and if both bits are 1, the result is 1, 0 where they aren't both 1.
In VFP you could do:
nResult = BITAND(0x1080e118,0xfffffeff)
nResult = BITCLEAR(0x1080e118,8)

Additional functions:
An XOR is a bit by bit comparison of the two values and if both bits match, the result is 1.
ANDs, ORs, and XOR's can manipulate more than 1 bit at a time.

Shifting is moving the bit pattern to the left or right.

Not reverses the bit patterns.

VFP has functions:
BITAND(), BITCLEAR( ), BITLSHIFT( ), BITNOT( ), BITOR( ), BITRSHIFT( ), BITTEST( ), BITXOR( )

These functions are useful for manipulating hardware, or for setting/resetting flag values for Windows API type calls.

I don't know if this is what you're looking for or not, but maybe someone will benefit from this.