Programmer's conundrums

[Don Y]

> And I totally agree with your point about packing bits and loss of
> carry.  The things I've done to get carry in C.

Particularly frustrating when dealing with multiple precision
arithmetic.  You just *know* that if you were writing it in
ASM, the carry would be there "for free".  Yet, you have
to add a separate step to deliberately synthesize it in C
(or, change the fundamental algorithm that you use -- which
just obfuscates that little detail)

Sort of like converting to decimal:

	digit = value % 10;
	value /= 10;

whereas if you were writing it in ASM, both results would
be available to you in the same operation (though, with
access to ASM, you would probably use a faster algorithm!)