I'm sorry. After 25 years in the software business (but using only high level languages) you would think I would know you can't simplifiy a programming problem into a couple of sentences.
I have 16 switches. Using a encoder/debouncer I get a BCD value of which of the 16 buttons was pressed. This only takes 4 lines of my I/O which is good. HOWEVER, I need (for other reasons) to determine which button was pressed via a bit flag in memory. So if, for example, button 7 was pressed I do NOT want 0000 0000 0000 0111 in memory. To the rest of the code this would indicate that buttons 1 2 and 3 were pressed. So I wanted to take the BCD value (7 in this example) and use it as my loop counter to shift left 7 times which would give me 0000 0000 0100 0000. Of course I would initialize the memory location with 0000 0000 0000 0001 before the loop routine was called. I had hoped I could use the DPTR register but seems there is no shift left opcode with that particular one.

Am I making things hard?

Thanks for all your help so far.