[VanWEric]

don't use any floats or doubles anywhere in the program. at all. not even one. the 2sx doesn't have the foggiest of what a decimal point was. What i was trying to say is that although an int will truncate correctly when all is said and told, the math inbetween will not. for example, in pbasic, 5/2*2=4, not 5. C++ will do all the math out with some ungodly precision and then truncate. you may need to change x=x/2*2 to x=x/2; x=x*2.
Also, declaring it as an unsigned might be better, so that you automatically get wrapping up top and below, ie 267 doesnt exist and neither does -6. don't know how to handle the 255 thing with out anal checking in the code.

BTW - i have used words as well (hence the title of the post) and have accessed specific bits in a byte. ie

var variable= 126
variable.bit5=1

good luck getting that to work. I think you'll need to use bit masking or some other craziness