C includes operators to manipulate memory at the bit level. This is useful for writing low level hardware or operating system code where the ordinary abstractions of numbers, characters, pointers, etc… are insufficient - an increasingly rare need. Bit manipulation code tends to be less “portable”.
Peter Meyer has been programming computers for much of the last 37 years and has worked as an employee in American and European companies, a consultant and an independent software developer, writing software in FORTRAN, BASIC, 6502 Assembler, dBASE/Foxbase, C and Visual Basic. He has a lot of articles on cryptology, as well as some crypto libraries.
This interview is mostly about cryptology.