That's a fairly reasonable approach. Looking for creativity in a relatively mundane problem is probably a good thing. The bitwise operator thing, if it actually needed to be used like you say, could be more appropriate for a coding standards guide if the candidate was otherwise suited. The immediate comparison I made, though admittedly contrived, was to that of the comma operator which I just learned about. Unlike self executing anonymous functions—which I'd consider hard to understand but critical to know—, they both fall into the category of fairly obscure pieces of syntax.