On Tue, 18 Oct 2005, bear wrote:

>> The bitwise operations operate on exact integers only. Should they
>> live in the section on exact arithmetic? Should they carry ex
>> prefixes? Or should they be extended to work on inexact integers as
>> well?
>
> I would say that having them operate on exact integers in the first
> place is questionable; These are operations on bit vectors, not
> operations on numbers, and their semantics require information (the
> vector length) which is not expressed by the numbers.  To say that
> they are defined on numbers is to confuse the number with a particular
> representation.

I share the discomfort with the bitwise operations.  As far as I can tell, the
SRFI does not portably specify the value of (BITWISE-NOT 42).

Are these operations truly going to be useful for portable programs?
If not, one might reasonably ask what they will be doing in a portability
standard such as R6RS.

Cheers
Andre