@AmpBenzScientist in Java/C# it would probably cause a syntax error, but you typically don't see much bitmasking code of this sort in those languages. i could have mentioned that this is C99 code (earlier revisions lack a "bool" type) i guess.

@AmpBenzScientist the code snippet would compile and run just fine in C if that was an int and not a bool, but i wanted to give some hints as to what you're supposed to do with the result (seeing as it's a truth value).

@lore Embarrassingly enough I seem to have mostly used something closer to ANSI C or C89. I do recall conditionals being used extensively. Well I guess I'll have to check out Fatboy Slim You've come a long way, Baby.
*/
There's also this dead give away from my code.
/*

@lore That's likely where I got confused. In Mathematics the tilde (~) is used to negate. For a Boolean value we used T or F instead of 0 and 1. This is because they are True or False and the 0 or 1 could imply that they are integers. While {0,1} are a subset of Integers, they are merely place holders and not subject to operations.

Perhaps what confused me the most was that there was no mod 2 operation visible. I do assume at first that it would return two values but I couldn't understand why it would do so.
(See nearly every example of C with return 0 ie it worked or the other numbers from where code failed.)

The more I looked at it, it started to appear to be a weird Comp Sci thing and it did turn into more weird Comp Sci things. I've used C for a while and Cpp until around 4 years ago when Cpp++ really made me hate it.

I'm stumped, it seemingly returns bit flipped X (or negation X) And 1. I don't see what it does and I'm not cheating and compiling it. Assuming that X has the value of 0 it could bit flip to 1 and that's what the result is but I really don't get what the & 1 is doing. Very humbling.