Getting rid of bitwise operators in Python 3?

[Bryan Olson]

Carl Banks wrote:
> Not many people are bit-fiddling these days.  One of the main uses of bit 
> fields is flags, but that's not often done in Python because of keyword 
> arguments and dicts, which are lot more versatile.  Another major use, 
> talking to hardware, is not something oft done in Python either.
[...]
> Of course I'm not suggesting to get rid of bitwise operations altogether; 
> just make them builtin functions: "x & 1" becomes "bitwise_and(x,1)" and 
> so on.

Based on one informal survey (of my recollection), many
Pythoneers bit-twiddle, and all of them also know C. For
this population, Python's adoption of C's bitwise operators
helps avoid user-out-of-memory errors. Python even kept C's
counter-intuitive low precedence for shifts.

One surprising result was that more of the Python
programmers surveyed use bitwise operators than are aware
of the exponentiation operator, which C does not offer.

Possibly the study used a bias sample.


-- 
--Bryan