I've never had a blue-screen in XP.

I ran Windows NT 4.0 for 4 years, day in and day out, without a single crash or blue-screen.

Use good hardware with good drivers, and good configuration and Windows NT-based kernels are stable as a rock.

I absolutely agree with your claim that languages should abstract away machine-level details.

However, representing bit-vectors as integers is an extremely common practice in C and other languages, and any competent programmer will recognize this idiom. (See for example the "flags" argument for the UNIX open(2) call.) With a little bit of (tasteful) preprocessor use, you can basically get the same sort of code as the example in your initial post. Finally, while you must put in some extra effort if data are to be shared between machines of different architectures, this practice is basically portable as well.