This one verifies bitmasks where low bits are set to 1 (hence the name).
Any stray 0 among the lower ones or any stray 1 among the higher zeros
renders the mask invalid.
The edge cases of all zeros and all ones are considered valid masks.
It uses an efficient implementation. It's the counterpart of
https://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html#DetermineIfPowerOf2
This attempts to make some bit arithmetic more self-documenting and also
make it easier during review to identify potential off-by-one errors by
making it possible to just specify which bits are being extracted.
Functions both support the case where bits being extracted can vary and
fixed bit extraction. In the case the bits are fixed, compile-time asserts
are present to prevent accidental API usage at compile-time.
e.g. Instead of shifting and masking to get bits 10 to 15,
Common::ExtractBits<10, 15>(value) can just be done instead.
Niels Boehm