Bitfield structs and suggestion

[Robert Fraser]

Richard Bradley wrote:
> I would also like to suggest that this isn't a rarely-used feature. You run into this issue anytime you want to read or write to hardware, (or link to a library that talks to hardware) or access any sort of network protocol stack, or any type of communication protocol.

It's also used to reduce database throughput and in serialization of 
large structures to files, among other things. Although I'm not at all a 
"low-level"/"close-to-the-metal" programmer, I would definitely 
appreciate such a feature.