Guido van Rossum wrote:
I think it's a very rarely used feature that is more likely to baffle the casual reader.
However there's currently no way to efficiently do bitwise operations en masse on raw bytes without converting to and from long integers, which doesn't seem very satisfactory. Refusing to provide this ability for the above reason sounds like purity beating practicality to me.
The question of what to do with byte strings of unequal length is just the first issue that crops up.
I would raise an exception.
The (still legitimate) question why we would support | and & but not << and >> is another.
Ambiguity due to byte order seems like a good enough reason not to implement shifts as operators. Maybe provide methods that specify a byte order explicitly? -- Greg