To "C" or not to see, that is no question

I was following some "C" code made by somebody else and I came upon this simple thing:

In pseudo English: Clear bit(s) y
x &= ~y;
4056d7: 83 e6 f7              and    ebp,0xfffffffffffffff7

Well that may not make sense to anybody who doesn't program and:

In pseudo English: Set bit(s) y
x |= y;
mode |= y;
40570c: 83 cd 08              or     ebp,0x8

is the opposite. In my mind I see it many ways and since I also do assembly it makes me think of :

and ebp,NOT y
or  ebp,y

This can be done many ways and it can take fewer CPU cycles on certain machines. I have looked at the generated code and there is a decomposition to the very logic of sub structure that is so elegant it almost defies imagining. This leads me to believe that of all the developers in the FOSS architecture, those who work with the gnu c compiler, have to be some seriously talented people.

I am sure that nobody wants to know what logic gate arrangement popped into my mind at the same time and though I think the gcc developers must be a source of many good bits, I doubt that they ( or anybody ) would appreciate me confusing them with gate array logic, DNA quadric logic, or CAM logic of the same things. I am not even sure I appreciate having those things mixed in my mind. It also gets into propositional logic, and Turing and many other things.

I also see hidden surfaces, recursive Julia and Mandelbrots, hidden sets, and many other things when I do openGL graphics. Some days I wonder if when I am older I will say "In my day, we walked to school, and we made all our bits by hand."