Bit manipulations good practices

Question

As a beginner C programmer, I am wondering, what would be the best easy-to-read and easy-to-understand solution for setting control bits in a device. Are there any standards

Answer 1

Other answers have already covered most of the stuff, but it might be worthwhile to mention that even if you can't use the non-standard 0b syntax, you can use shifts to move the 1 bit into position by bit number, i.e.:

#define DMA_BYTE  (1U << 0)
#define DMA_HW    (1U << 1)
#define DMA_WORD  (1U << 2)
#define DMA_GO    (1U << 3)
// …

Note how the last number matches the "bit number" column in the documentation.

The usage for setting and clearing bits doesn't change:

#define DMA_CONTROL_REG DMA_base_ptr[DMA_CONTROL_OFFS]

DMA_CONTROL_REG |= DMA_HW | DMA_WORD;    // set HW and WORD
DMA_CONTROL_REG &= ~(DMA_BYTE | DMA_GO); // clear BYTE and GO