Hacker News Reader

Comment by cameronkknight | Hacker News Reader

Bitwise operators for JavaScript are unused except in special cases, as JavaScript really doesn't handle bitwise as one might expect. Everything is cast to either int32 (or uint32 in the case of >>>) and then recast back into a Number (8-bit IEEE-754 floating point). Due to their relative lack of use, freeing up the symbols to represent something else seemed prudent.

View on HN

I've seen them get quite a bit of use in graphical code, which is, well, actually fairly common in JS.

Code that uses bitwise operations looks fairly ugly as is. Hav e you considered enabling them with a prefix or suffix? E.G. ^$ instead of bitxor, or >>$ instead of bitrshift...

That could be possible, you could even do it today, if you wanted:

    macro operator binary ^$
      ASTE $left bitxor $right

There are also operators for `and`, `or`, `xor` which act logically. `not` which does a boolean invert. So there are `bitand`, `bitor`, `bitxor`, `bitnot` which fit well as working bitwise instead of logically.

I suppose the outliers are `bitlshift`, `bitrshift`, `biturshift`, but it does somewhat make sense to keep the `bit` prefix because it casts to int32 and because its operations are inherently bitwise.

how about _& instead of the lengthy and typo prone "bitand"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com