Definition
A bit array is a mapping from some domain (almost always a range of integers) to values in the set {0, 1}. The values can be interpreted as dark/light, absent/present, locked/unlocked, valid/invalid, et cetera. The point is that there are only two possible values, so they can be stored in one bit. The array can be viewed as a subset of the domain (e.g. {0, 1, 2, ..., n−1}), where a 1 bit indicates a number in the set and a 0 bit a number not in the set. This set data structure uses about n/w words of space, where w is the number of bits in each machine word. Whether the least significant bit or the most significant bit indicates the smallest-index number is largely irrelevant, but the former tends to be preferred.
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