On Fri, 19 Dec 2003, Paulo Jorge de Oliveira Cantante de Matos wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I've been waiting for someone to revive srfi33, however it seems no one
>has enough time for it. I don't have much either but I think I can spend
>my free time (not much... ;)) working on reviving this.
>
>I would like to know if Olin doesn't mind about reviving this srfi since
>he is the original author. And I would like to ask the editors what need
>to be done to officially revive the srfi.
>

I think that numbers and strings of bits are sufficiently different
ideas, and that the differences between them are sufficiently important,
that I'd support the idea of bitstrings as a separate disjoint type,
with its own read syntax and everything.  So I'd go for something like

(bitwise-and \1001 \0110) => \1111

Alternatively, you could regard bitstrings as a kind of vector and
read/write them using vector syntax.  In that case you'd have

(bitwise-and #(1 0 0 1) #(0 1 1 0) )   => #(1 1 1 1)

which is how common lisp does it.  But Common Lisp has typed-vector
infrastructure we don't.

And suddenly, typed vectors bring us back to the current SRFI-47.
Should au1 be added to the set of vector types for SRFI-47, with
bitwise-operations and bitstring<->integer conversions defined on
bit arrays in a following SRFI?

				Bear